Note to readers: The Howard County Elberta peaches showed up on the porch a little early this year. But it's never too early to rerun this ode to them first appearing last August.

August can get you down. It's the only month without a national holiday. Its heat can become embedded in a way that doesn't abate sufficiently overnight to make even the early mornings passable.

August in Arkansas can put a man of a certain age in mind of eighth-grade football practice in the 1960s--of taking salt tablets and throwing up while the coach laughs and says he didn't think he'd ever see you work hard enough to get sick.

That was the coach who sent me downfield to catch and run back punts while bigger ninth-grade boys practiced varsity punt coverage. The idea was for them to speed hard at me with designs on doing great harm to my younger, frail, then-undersized self.

The coach said he'd never seen a kid as averse as I was to getting hit, and he thought on that basis that I might be pretty good at running away from fast-charging pursuers, one of whom was called Moose.

Indeed, I fielded the bouncing first punt, started running right as directed in the huddle and saw that the evil forces had the angle........

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