The Pace, Explained. (By a Lifelong Outsider.)
Real summer heat makes me weak and lazy. The rest of the year, I will run or walk. In the winter, the cold makes for an alacrity, gives me reason to run on its coldest days, with needle-like incisions through the cracks between my gloves and my sleeves, my neckline and hat, urging me: Go, go, go.

On days like today, when it’s 90 degrees at nine-o’-clock in the damn morning, I understand all the old stereotypes about the slow-moving South. I don’t want to move. If we had a screened porch like my grandma’s, I’d migrate out there with a book or knitting and a lemonade, but that’s as far as I’d get to the Great Outdoors today, and that act of relocation would be the closest I’d get to exercise.

Today I set my alarm for eight, to get up and run while there was still some morning cool, excited about that extra burst of adrenaline to start my day. When I woke up though, I could tell it was already hot out. Our flimsy little box of a house with its air conditioning, ceiling fans and heavy blinds is clearly but precarious protection from real heat like this. You can be anywhere in the house and you’ll feel it pressing against the walls and windows: the kind of heat that makes trickles of sweat run down the front of your shirt when you so much as walk to the mailbox. So you don’t, deciding to wait till evening instead, when the sun’s moved to a slightly kinder angle. You stay inside and go to the refrigerator instead, reach for the eggs and the milk with your atrophied arm muscles. You will make French toast, then you will watch movies or read a book. You’re not sure, yet. You will make these decisions slowly.