By Wayne Hinshaw

For the Salisbury Post

Tuesday marked the end of the hottest June in local history. The month was so hot that Tuesday’s 91 degrees felt like Mother Nature was providing some relief.

From June 14 though 26, Rowan County had 13 straight days of temperatures of 95-plus, according to local weather watcher Bill Poole. That included three days at 100 degrees. Five new records were set.

Life goes on, with people dealing with the heat in different ways.

In Spencer, a hot, sweaty, shirtless Allen Basinger cuts the grass in front of Piedmont Radiator Works with an electric string trimmer.  Not only was the temperature hot, Basinger was hot under the collar (wait, no collar…)  that the power cord to his equipment quit and he had to get a different cord. As he did his yard work, the irony of the situation was he was cutting grass in the hot sunshine in front of a “air conditioner repair” sign.

Down on South Lee Street in Salisbury, Ricky Herndon looked for relief from the heat sitting on the park bench under the shade of the bushes.

His bike is his usual mode of transportation, but on this day it was just plain hot.

“It is rough and just too hot,” Herndon said. “I have been watering my garden at home twice as much as I usually do. I haven’t got my water bill yet.” 

He continues, “At home I sit in the shade a little while and then go back to the house and get in the air condition.” His advice is to “find a shade tree somewhere and stay out of the sun on a hot day.”

Down on East Bank Street, Linda Edmondson stopped watering a flower garden to talk. “We need rain, we really do. My roses get an inch of city water each week, and they are mulched.  They grow better with rain water. I don’t think they like the chemicals in the city water.”

A mail carrier with the Postal Service came down the street carrying his mail bag with sweat running down his face.

Stopping for a minute to talk about photography, he pulled out a bottle of water and gulped down some water.

Who is this mail carrier? He is Joseph,”the Mail Carrier,” saying, “That is enough of my name.”