The Ecstasy of Humidity
I long for sweat. Last year, I moved to upstate New York from Florida. All winter and spring I tried to sweat. I missed it terribly. I attended hot-yoga classes in heavy layers in an attempt to sweat as much as possible. As an amateur boxer, for years I have trusted coaches who extolled the benefits of heat, saying it can improve cardio endurance and strengthen immune systems. I realize now that this has all been an attempt to find a sense of home.
I was born and raised in Central Florida. Some of my most visceral childhood memories are of sweat. The smell, the slickness, the taste. Growing up, I spent a lot of time outside and, thanks to all the sweat that clung to my skin, I was always coming home covered in dirt, grass and sand. In the summer — which in Florida lasts from approximately April to November — the heat encouraged a physical looseness: shorts, bare feet, sticky rumpled tank tops, bathing suits even when there were no swimming pools in sight, hair plastered to cheeks and skulls. At 90 percent humidity, decorum goes out the window; the elements bend you to their will. I didn’t always enjoy this. My mother has reminded me of how heatsick I would get as a child, how easily I burned, how she often had to clamp freezing cold towels to the back of my neck to keep me from vomiting or passing out. I have a memory of becoming so dangerously overheated at a dodgeball game that it felt as if I was drowning.
I fled all that in my 20s, clawing my way out of a tumultuous and painful adolescence and young adulthood and operating under the false belief that moving was all I had to do to bury that history. I landed in Boston with the urgency of a person trying to escape a burning house. I was convinced that becoming the person I intended to be required living in a place with seasons, even as I struggled to traverse my first New England winter in the stiletto boots I had purchased at the Florida Mall. I met my husband in Vermont. Our jobs as writers and teachers allowed us to live many places together, all of them far less sweaty than Florida. I got used to Northeast winters. I acquired ugly, practical winter boots. In a college town in Pennsylvania, I learned to shovel snow. For a long time, my husband and I returned to Florida only for holidays; I didn’t dare stay too long, afraid of getting burned. In my mid-30s, my father got sick, and I began visiting more frequently. Once, after visiting him in the hospital, my sister and I took a long walk in a wilderness area on a boiling July afternoon, and it felt so good to me, that eviscerating heat. After my sister dropped me off at the airport, I cried all the way back to Boston.
My father died in February 2019. On the day of his funeral, the sky was blue and cloudless. Later, at my brother’s house, I stood outside by a lake, in the company of family, and watched the sunset turn the sky phosphorescent. Up North, the weather had been frigid and bleak; this was the most time I had spent outside in months. I felt, to my amazement, the flickers of a call toward home.
When my husband and I landed in Florida in early 2020, what was initially a pandemic-induced stay ended up lasting three years. That March, the heat had not yet turned supersonic, but the weather was still sticky. I went for runs at dawn and returned with sweat dripping from my fingertips. Time felt fuzzy and strange, but the sweat was tangible evidence of having done something. In the thick of summer, the physical ease of childhood returned. I started wearing short-shorts and a sports bra to walk my dog, not caring how I looked, and afterward sprayed myself off with a hose.
Most summer afternoons were roiled by thunderstorms — in the lead-up to which the air became brick-dense. Often there was no wind, just a heat-soaked stillness, as though the entire landscape was too sun-drunk to move. On runs, I cried because sweat dripped into my eyeballs and burned. Sometimes I had to stop and swipe at my face with the hem of my T-shirt, furious at the weather. When I was eventually able to resume my boxing training, I discovered an entirely new level of sweat. Fighters brought fresh T-shirts to change into halfway through class. We left the ring stained with our sweat. Perspiration dripped from our bodies as we walked across the searing parking lot to our cars.
