I always like it when September rolls around and I know we only have another 2 months of sweltering heat and humidity to get through to enjoy that perfect Georgia October weather. Even though it is still technically summer Labor days symbolizes, to most people, the end of summer and the end of wearing white, whatever that means. I know a lot of people that look forward to the holiday. They look forward to the extra day off of work and grilling out with friends and family. Relaxing. To me, thanks to childhood experiences, Labor Day has always had a different meaning. Labor.
I can not recall one summer where there wasn’t the threat of a hurricane in a two-week window on either side of Labor Day. Not one. And most years by Labor day one or tropical storms had already made their way through our landlocked, central Georgia, hometown. They didn’t cause a lot of damage but they always made a mess. And for some reason, my Dad waited to clean up said mess until Labor Day. Truth be told that was the day he waited to do any yard work that wasn’t in a vegetable garden for the entire year. I’m not saying our yard was messy, but if it were going to win any awards it wouldn’t be until after Labor Day.
My Dad interpreted the meaning of Labor Day, at least for us kids, in the literal sense. It was to be a day of labor. Hard. Labor. For a kid, Labor Day is the first holiday after school starts. The first morning you don’t have to wake up early or be rushed eating breakfast to not miss the bus. Most kids got to sit in the air conditioner and watch cartoons. Not us. 6 am, every Labor Day started with the old man banging on a plastic five-gallon bucket to jolt us out of bed and get us ready for our annual servitude.
He’d take us in the backyard and give us our pick of chores. Picking up sticks. Raking falling pecan debris. Loading and dumping the wheelbarrow. Or his all-time favorite, stacking firewood. The latter of which we all ended up doing at some point in the day and many other times throughout the year. Labor Day was the big firewood push though. Around this time of year, we would inevitably inherit a bunch of huge tree limbs that didn’t make it through the storm. People would just drop them off, I guess because they knew he liked firewood. Personally I think he had a deep phobia that Earth was going to get knocked off its axis and Georgia would become the new Arctic circle. There are very few times we didn’t have enough firewood to put a small barbeque restaurant franchise to shame.
One year a particularly strong hurricane came through and my duties including hauling branches through the yard and having to break them all into individual pieces and then sort them into piles by size. I was never trusted with an ax or a hatchet because of my tendency towards clumsiness and was left to my own devices to break up the huge limbs. Sweating and tired in the 98% humidity we got to take a break and were given a lesson in building a survival fire with nothing more than a magnifying glass. Because nothing is more comforting than standing next to a fire in high summer.
As I got older and learned how and why Labor Day was created I started to revolt and would strategically make sure I was at a friend’s house or somewhere else when it rolled around. At times, in my few moments of profound depth and reflection, I am left to wonder if the ‘labor’ part of Labor Day was the celebration part for my father. He was a laborer, a carpenter by trade, and suffered every day in the hot sun while we sat in air conditioning watching tv. Was watching us suffer, moan, and complain, his entertainment on this working man’s holiday? As much as I’d like to think it wasn’t, I sure bet he got a kick out of watching chubby little me struggle to break up tree branches, put them all in neat piles, just to burn them all up as if it never happened. I am still ‘laboring’ over that.
