One shirt. That’s all I wore Monday night at the opening of the Grandpa Fair of the South. One shirt.

Sure, I wore pants and shoes too, otherwise I would have been arrested or at least detained and questioned as to why I was “sans pantalones” at the county fair. No, I’m talking about going the entire night at the DeKalb County Fair without having to make a costume change.

In case you haven’t noticed, the fair in Alexandria is hot. No, I take that back. It’s not just hot, it’s scorching. I guess that goes with the territory when the fair is in July.

I grew up a few miles to the south in Warren County where they have their fair the second full week in September. That provides a whole new set of issues as it seems that week yearly marks the change between summer and winter. That’s right, this is Tennessee. We don’t have fall and spring, we just go right into the extremes. I can remember years where I began the week walking around at the McMinnville fair in a tank top and shorts and ended it shivering inside my car, my hands under the heater trying to restore feeling to my frozen digits.

There’s no such issue in Alexandria as I found out during my rookie year covering the fair last year. Sweat began to pour as soon as I got out of my car. I was already a ball of sweat by the time I walked through the parking lot.

“What is this?” I asked myself as I wiped the sweat out of my eyes as I rounded the midway for the first time. “Is it always this hot?”

“Oh, it gets hotter,” a man overheard my conversation with myself. “But it’s not the heat so much as the humidity.”

“Yeah, it’s like a thousand percent,” I agreed as a bead of sweat rolled down by back.

Given last year’s merciless humidity, I ended up packing three shirts for each night at the fair. I would sweat one up, go to the car and towel off and put on another. Then I would repeat it with a third shirt before driving home that night so I wouldn’t sweat up my car.

So, given what I learned last year, I packed three shirts in my car this year. However, as I walked around the midway I noticed sweat wasn’t pouring from my brow and my shirt was somewhat dry.

“I’m still on my first shirt,” I bragged to someone, noting how much cooler it was Monday night.

Now, with that said, I’m still packing three shirts for the rest of the evenings at the fair. Tennessee weather is changeable and I know from the pair of scorching days at the Jamboree just last week, where it was as hot as the face of the sun, that this summer can still pack a punch. But hey, better for it to be hot than to do that four-letter word that starts with the letter R.