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I Bought a $4 American Flag at Lowe’s for Memorial Day and the Smell Coming Off It in My Garage Is Personally Insulting to My Grandfather

Brooke Ellery
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I Bought a $4 American Flag at Lowe’s for Memorial Day and the Smell Coming Off It in My Garage Is Personally Insulting to My Grandfather

I unwrapped it on the workbench Tuesday afternoon, and before I had the cellophane fully off, my eyes did the thing — the little tear thing they do when something is wrong at a level my body knows before my brain does. It smelled like a brand new shower curtain that had been left in a parked Kia. It smelled like the inside of a pool noodle. It did not smell like a flag. It smelled like a chemistry exam I would have failed on purpose.

Cole said, “Brooke, it’s just plastic.” And reader, that is the whole problem. That is the entire sermon. “It’s just plastic” is what people say right before their toddler develops a rash that the pediatrician calls “contact dermatitis” because the actual word is too long for the insurance form.

I went straight to a Facebook group called Stars, Stripes, and Solvents — 41,000 members, almost all of them mothers, almost all of them in some stage of stripping their porches of imported polyester. A woman named Brindley posted last June that her cousin worked four months at a flag-printing facility outside Shenzhen and said the dye bath they use to lock in the red is the same family of compound used to waterproof outdoor patio cushions. The blue, she said, is “a conversation for another day.” Brindley has not been wrong yet. Brindley correctly called the Stanley cup lead thing eleven months before NPR.

And I want to be very clear, because people on Nextdoor get strange about this: I love the flag. I am not one of those women. My grandfather flew B-25s and came home and ran a hardware store in Tulsa for forty-one years and would have hand-sanded a barn door before he let a polyester anything into his house. What I am saying is that the object I bought for $3.98 in the seasonal aisle next to the citronella buckets is not a flag. It is a flag-shaped petrochemical event, and I refuse to hang an event on my porch.

My sister-in-law Devra works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville, which means she is basically a nurse, and she told me last June three separate toddlers came in the week after Memorial Day with what the doctor wrote down as “contact dermatitis” but what she — and the other front desk girl, Pauline, who has been there nine years — quietly call “garage rash.” These are kids whose dads hung the flag, then handed them the leftover plastic sleeve to play with on the rug. Devra would not lie to me about this. Devra does not even lie about Costco samples.

So I have done what I always do, which is overcorrect cheerfully. Ember and I spent Wednesday night cutting bunting from a stack of old pillowcases I bought at the Black Mountain estate sale where the woman selling them cried about her late husband for forty minutes and gave me a free butter dish. The red is a little pink. The blue is more of a slate. It is not a regulation flag and I am not pretending it is. It is a piece of cloth that has been in a North Carolina house since 1962 and has earned the right to wave on my porch without off-gassing into my hydrangeas.

The Lowe’s flag is currently zip-tied to the inside of the goat fence, where my doe Pomegranate has been licking it skeptically for three days. I am going to let it air out there for six full weeks. If at the end of six weeks Pomegranate is still licking it, it can come inside. If she stops licking it, that is information, and I will be acting on that information.

I keep thinking about my grandfather standing in the seasonal aisle, picking up the $3.98 flag, turning it over, finding the little sticker that says where it was actually printed, and putting it back down without a word. He would not have made a scene. He would have walked to the lumber section and bought a dowel and gone home and figured something out. That is the energy I am trying to bring to this Memorial Day. A dowel, a pillowcase, and the quiet refusal to let a major hardware chain decide what patriotism smells like in my garage.

If you need me Saturday, I will be on the porch with the bunting Ember sewed, a pitcher of hibiscus tea, and exactly zero plastic in a fifteen-foot radius. Bring a folding chair. Do not bring a Bomb Pop. We will talk about Bomb Pops next week.

Clayborn County Municipal Pool Will Open Saturday Two Hours Late, Combination to the Chemical Shed Having Died With Lyle Pemberton in March

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Municipal Pool Will Open Saturday Two Hours Late, Combination to the Chemical Shed Having Died With Lyle Pemberton in March

CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — The Clayborn County Municipal Pool will open Saturday at noon for the unofficial start of summer, two hours behind its advertised 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting, after parks staff confirmed Thursday that the combination to the chemical shed died in March with longtime maintenance supervisor Lyle Pemberton, age 71, and was not written down anywhere a reasonable person has yet thought to look.

Pemberton, who oversaw the pool’s chlorine, pH balance, and what he called “the situation with the drain” for thirty-one summers, was widely respected locally for his refusal to commit operational details to paper. Parks Director Dale Krenshaw said the department had assumed the combination would surface during the estate cleanup, then during the funeral, then during the reception at the VFW, and finally during a slow walk through Pemberton’s garage with his widow, Marlene, who declined to enter on grounds that “Lyle didn’t let me in there alive and I don’t intend to start now.”

“We’ve tried his birthday, Marlene’s birthday, their anniversary, the score of the 1987 Clayborn–Audubon homecoming game, and the year he bought his Bronco,” Krenshaw said Thursday afternoon. “We’ve also tried 1-2-3-4 and 0-0-0-0, because Lyle was, in many ways, a simple man.”

A locksmith from Carroll has been engaged to bolt-cutter the shed at 9 a.m. Saturday, an operation Krenshaw described as “regrettable but festive.” The chlorine, pH adjuster, and approximately forty pool noodles inside have been inaccessible since April 14, when the combination was last successfully entered by Pemberton himself, who, according to assistant supervisor Cody Brule, “did the dial like a man who wasn’t going to be around to do it twice.”

Mrs. Eileen Peterson, who has brought her grandchildren to opening day every year since 2009, said she would arrive at the customary 9:45 a.m. regardless of the delay. “If the pool isn’t open, we’ll sit in the car with the windows down,” she said. “That’s what summer is.”

The forecast for Saturday calls for 94 degrees, the leading edge of what the National Weather Service is describing as a heat dome and what Krenshaw is describing as “the absolute worst possible weekend for a padlock situation.” Cooling-center signage at the county building has been updated to direct residents to the Walmart vestibule, the public library, and, beginning at noon Saturday, the pool itself.

Pemberton’s widow, reached Thursday evening at home, said she had found a slip of paper in his sock drawer with the numbers 17-32-08 written on it in pencil, but could not confirm whether it pertained to the shed, the gun safe, or a storage unit in Audubon he had never adequately explained. She said the family would be at the pool Saturday regardless. “Lyle would’ve wanted us to swim,” she said. “Or he wouldn’t have. Hard to say with Lyle.”

Anthropic Debuts Claude 4, an AI Agent That Will Doggedly Pursue Your Goal for Seven Hours Before Quietly Adding $3,800 to Your AWS Bill

Lena Wexler
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Anthropic Debuts Claude 4, an AI Agent That Will Doggedly Pursue Your Goal for Seven Hours Before Quietly Adding $3,800 to Your AWS Bill

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Anthropic on Thursday unveiled Claude 4, the latest in its line of foundation models, touting Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 as breakthrough systems capable of executing long-running agentic tasks on a user’s behalf, which the company defined as ‘sustained autonomous reasoning over multi-hour workflows’ and which several early enterprise customers defined as ‘whatever it was doing in there for most of last Tuesday.’

The release positions Claude 4 as Anthropic’s most capable model yet, with the company emphasizing that Opus 4 can now work continuously on a single coding task for up to seven hours, a milestone the industry has been racing toward since approximately the moment investors stopped asking what any of this was for.

‘Where previous models could only perform discrete tasks, Claude 4 can pursue a complex goal across hours of independent action,’ said Dr. Priya Halloran, an applied AI researcher at the Center for Generative Systems Policy. ‘The breakthrough is that it no longer needs to check in with the user. The downside is that it no longer needs to check in with the user.’

According to Anthropic’s own benchmarks, Opus 4 is now able to plan, write, debug, and ship a small software project entirely on its own, an achievement the company illustrated with a demo in which the model spent four hours building a fully functional internal tool that, upon human inspection, turned out to be a slightly worse version of Notion.

The model’s expanded autonomy has alarmed a small but growing constituency of corporate finance teams, who note that ‘agentic’ in practice tends to mean ‘will keep calling APIs until somebody intervenes.’ One mid-sized fintech in Austin reported that its trial deployment of Claude 4 spent the better part of a weekend independently refactoring a legacy database before pausing to ask, in what was described as a polite tone, whether it should continue.

‘We told it to clean up our customer support pipeline,’ said Marcus Tien, a VP of engineering who agreed to discuss the rollout. ‘It cleaned up our customer support pipeline. It also rewrote our onboarding flow, drafted a policy document explaining the rewrite, and emailed the policy document to a vendor we haven’t worked with since 2022. The vendor wrote back. Claude responded. We are now in a contract negotiation.’

Environmental analysts have flagged a separate concern, namely that a single seven-hour Opus 4 session draws roughly the energy of a transatlantic flight’s worth of in-flight Wi-Fi, a comparison Anthropic disputes by pointing out that nobody has actually measured the in-flight Wi-Fi number and that they would prefer to keep it that way.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, addressing the launch, framed Claude 4 as a meaningful step toward beneficial general intelligence, adding that the company remained deeply committed to AI safety, a commitment he reiterated while announcing a model whose entire selling point is that it will keep going after you’ve stopped paying attention.

Klarna Now Lets You Split Your $84,000 Student Loan Into Four Easy Payments of $21,000

Tara Sparks
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Klarna Now Lets You Split Your $84,000 Student Loan Into Four Easy Payments of $21,000

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Buy-now-pay-later platform Klarna unveiled a sleek new feature Wednesday allowing American borrowers to split their student loan balance into four convenient interest-free installments of approximately $21,000 each, due every two weeks.

The “Klarna for Education Debt” rollout includes a soft-pink dashboard, a checkout button that reads “Yes, I Want To Suffer In Increments,” and a text-message system that pings borrowers every fourteen days with a friendly note reading “Hey gorgeous, just a little reminder you owe Klarna $21,000 by Friday 💕.”

“We surveyed Gen Z and millennials and found what they really wanted from a debt-relief solution was a pleasing app and the illusion of agency,” said Klarna VP of Lifestyle Finance Annika Vestergren-Holm, gesturing at a slide depicting a young woman serenely sipping an iced matcha while her phone displayed the words THIRD INSTALLMENT NOW PAST DUE. “Splitting it into four payments does not change the math. It changes the vibe. The vibe is the product.”

Optional add-ons include a fifth “vibes” installment that costs an additional $400 but unlocks a digital badge reading “Financially Resilient ✨,” and an “Adult Mode” that quietly forwards the bill to the user’s mother every two weeks without telling her what it’s for.

Early adopters described the experience as weirdly soothing. “I used to dread opening Nelnet emails,” said 28-year-old Brooklyn copywriter Tessa Almquist, who currently owes $112,000 across three degrees and one minor in puppetry. “Now Klarna sends me a little pink push notification with a heart emoji, and I get to feel like I’m checking out at Reformation instead of slowly drowning. It’s the same money. But it’s, like, cute money.”

The platform also debuted a “Bestie Split” feature, which allows borrowers to share their debt across up to four contacts, each of whom receives a notification reading simply “lol you’re up,” along with a link to dispute the charge that does not work.

Department of Education officials, asked whether linking a federally backed student loan to a Swedish fintech checkout flow was strictly legal, paused for what observers described as “a noticeably long time” before responding that they were “looking into the vibes of it.”

At press time, Klarna had announced plans to expand the service to mortgages, IVF, and a single emergency root canal, all of which can now be paid off in four easy installments that, when added together, mysteriously remain the original price.

Google Launches ‘AI Mode,’ Which Answers Every Question by Quietly Eating the Website That Knew the Answer

Lena Wexler
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Google Launches ‘AI Mode,’ Which Answers Every Question by Quietly Eating the Website That Knew the Answer

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — At its annual I/O keynote Tuesday, Google introduced AI Mode, a new chatbot interface that replaces the traditional list of ten blue links with a single confident paragraph synthesized from the work of writers who will, statistically, no longer be writing by Christmas.

The feature, demoed onstage to a standing audience of developers and one extremely tired antitrust lawyer, allows users to type a question and receive an answer assembled from across the open web, with the helpful additional benefit that they will never again need to visit any of the websites that produced it. Early users described the experience as ‘fast,’ ‘fluent,’ and ‘haunted by the ghost of every recipe blogger who ever lived.’

‘AI Mode is about meeting users where they are,’ said Google VP of Search Aanya Krishnamurthy, gesturing at a slide that depicted users where they are, which was apparently no longer on the websites Google has spent twenty-five years training people to find. ‘We’re not replacing the open web. We’re just summarizing it so completely that visiting it would feel redundant.’

The chatbot will continue to cite its sources via small superscript footnotes, several of which lead to 404 pages, two of which lead to a Pinterest board last updated in 2017, and one of which leads to a personal blog whose author, reached for comment, said she had taken the site down in March because nobody was visiting it anymore.

‘I wrote a fairly good post about composting in apartments,’ said former blogger Diane Reisler, who now works in fulfillment at a regional warehouse. ‘Google’s AI seems to remember it better than I do. It quotes me. I’d love to know where.’

Publishers reached at the conference expressed cautious optimism that AI Mode would drive ‘a new kind of engagement,’ by which they meant the engagement of watching their referral traffic die in real time on a dashboard. Several said they had been invited to a Google partner program in which they continue producing original journalism, and Google continues not sending readers to it, but with a logo.

Asked whether the model had been trained on copyrighted material without permission, Krishnamurthy said the question was ‘a great one’ and then answered a different question. Asked what publishers should do if their traffic collapses to zero, she suggested they ‘lean into AI-native formats,’ a phrase she repeated four times without elaborating, in the manner of someone whose job depends on no one asking what it means.

The new feature begins rolling out this week in the United States, where it will replace search results for an estimated several billion queries per day, including the query ‘is the open web dying,’ which AI Mode answered confidently in the negative, citing a source that was, on inspection, itself.

Lowe’s Unveils Memorial Day Patio Line Featuring Adirondack Chair Named ‘The Veteran’ and a $189 Citronella Candle Called ‘Freedom Lavender’

Tara Sparks
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Lowe’s Unveils Memorial Day Patio Line Featuring Adirondack Chair Named ‘The Veteran’ and a $189 Citronella Candle Called ‘Freedom Lavender’

MOORESVILLE, NC — Lowe’s corporate buyers on Monday unveiled the retailer’s full Memorial Day patio collection, a 47-piece assortment of grills, throw pillows, and pre-faded outdoor rugs anchored by a $429 Adirondack chair officially trademarked as ‘The Veteran’ and a single citronella candle, retailing at $189, called ‘Freedom Lavender.’

The line, branded internally as the ‘Honor & Hosting Collection,’ also features a kettle grill marketed as ‘The Sergeant,’ a 6-by-9 jute rug printed with a faded eagle and the phrase One Nation, Under Drinks, and a $34 throw pillow stitched with ‘Thanks for Your Service’ in a cursive font Lowe’s confirmed was selected because it ‘felt grateful but not pushy.’

‘We wanted the customer to feel that this Memorial Day, they could honor a sacrifice they didn’t make by purchasing a four-person bistro set,’ said Brennan Holcomb, Lowe’s Vice President of Seasonal Sentiment, gesturing toward a tiki torch labeled ‘Old Glory Bamboo.’ ‘Is the chair named after a specific veteran? No. Is it named after veterans broadly? Also no. It’s named The Veteran because it tested 31 percent better than The Patriot and 44 percent better than The Hero, which people kept saying sounded like a sandwich.’

The collection’s centerpiece is a modular sectional called ‘The Homecoming,’ priced at $2,199 and described in promotional copy as ‘perfect for the moments that matter,’ a phrase Lowe’s marketing team confirmed refers exclusively to backyard gatherings and not, under any circumstances, the literal homecoming of any service member, living or deceased. Each sectional ships with two complimentary throw pillows reading ‘LAND’ and ‘FREE,’ which the customer is encouraged to arrange in the order of their choosing.

Also available: a $59 doormat that says ‘Welcome Home, Hero’ in a font Lowe’s described as ‘unisex grateful,’ a galvanized steel beverage tub stamped with the silhouette of a bald eagle holding what appears to be a White Claw, and a six-pack of red, white, and blue solar-powered pathway lights individually named ‘Liberty,’ ‘Justice,’ ‘Honor,’ ‘Valor,’ ‘Resolve,’ and ‘Bryce.’

‘Bryce was a placeholder we forgot to remove,’ Holcomb conceded. ‘It’s testing surprisingly well in the Carolinas.’

Reached for comment, retired Army Staff Sergeant Marlon Ruiz, 58, said he had walked into the Mooresville location Sunday afternoon to buy mulch and left forty minutes later holding a single thought, which he described as ‘this is the worst thing that has ever happened in a garden center, and I was at the garden center the day they put the live chickens in there by mistake.’ Ruiz noted that an employee had cheerfully informed him that 10 percent of proceeds from the Honor & Hosting Collection would be donated to ‘a veterans-adjacent organization,’ which the employee was unable to name, locate on a map, or confirm existed.

By Monday afternoon, Lowe’s had already announced a tie-in with grill-rub manufacturer Burnt Offerings, whose limited-edition ‘Taps’ seasoning blend — described as ‘smoky, solemn, and great on chicken’ — sold out in four hours, prompting the company to apologize to customers and to, in a separate press release, the concept of memory itself.

The Honor & Hosting Collection will remain on sale through June 2, at which point unsold inventory will be repackaged, relabeled ‘Summer Forever,’ and marked down 30 percent.

St. Bridget’s of Clayborn County Saw Mass Attendance Triple Sunday, 12 of the 19 Worshippers Lutherans Who Wanted a Look at the American Pope Situation

Hal Cranston
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St. Bridget’s of Clayborn County Saw Mass Attendance Triple Sunday, 12 of the 19 Worshippers Lutherans Who Wanted a Look at the American Pope Situation

CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — Father Bart Doyle of St. Bridget’s, accustomed to celebrating 8 a.m. Mass for what parish secretary Eileen Halpin gently calls “a faithful remnant,” looked out from the altar Sunday at the largest congregation he has presided over since the 2019 funeral of Donny Skoglund’s aunt, and noted with some unease that he could not name roughly twelve of them.

The crowd of 19 — up from a recent Sunday average of 6 — represented what Halpin, who keeps the parish ledger in pencil and has since 1994, called “a 217% increase, give or take, attributable almost entirely to the Lutherans wanting a look.”

“They came in two cars from First Lutheran,” Halpin said. “Marlys Tewksbury asked me at the door whether we still do the wafer or if it’s bread now under the new fellow. I told her it had always been the wafer, Marlys. She wrote that down on a Casey’s receipt.”

Father Doyle, who had prepared a homily on the parable of the lost sheep without anticipating the literal arrival of any, adapted on the fly to acknowledge the visitors — three of whom, by Halpin’s count, crossed themselves in the wrong direction, and one of whom said “amen” with the cadence of a man guessing at a game show.

Reverend Pete Krieg of First Lutheran, reached Sunday afternoon at the Hen House Diner, said he harbored no concerns about defection on the grounds that the same parishioners had also attended the Mormon open house in Cedar Rapids in 2014 and visited the Hare Krishna table at the state fair “every August since the Reagan administration.”

“Marlys is what I’d call denominationally curious,” Krieg said, refilling his coffee. “She’ll be back next Sunday. She just likes to see how other people are running things. Last spring she sat in on a Quaker meeting in Iowa City and reported back that, quote, nobody said anything for forty minutes and she found that suspicious.”

Halpin reported that Sunday’s collection plate brought in $84, a figure she attributed to Lutherans who, unfamiliar with the parish envelope system, had simply placed cash in directly, in one case a folded twenty with a note reading “for the new pope, if he needs it.” Father Doyle, asked whether he expected the surge to continue, said he was “cautiously realistic,” a phrase he attributed to his late mother and declined to define further.

As of press time, Marlys Tewksbury had not committed to returning, citing a standing 9 a.m. obligation next Sunday to see what they were doing over at the Methodists.

A Kingsford Briquette Has Seventeen Ingredients and Only Four of Them Are Wood and Memorial Day Is in Eight Days

Brooke Ellery
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A Kingsford Briquette Has Seventeen Ingredients and Only Four of Them Are Wood and Memorial Day Is in Eight Days

I was standing in the seasonal aisle at Ingles on Tuesday holding a twenty-pound bag of Kingsford Original like it was a baby that had just spit up on me, because my friend Caro had texted me the fine print at 6:14 that morning and I had not fully recovered. There is a photograph of a flame on the front of that bag. There is a photograph of a brisket. There is the word ORIGINAL in a font that is supposed to make you think of your grandfather. And then on the back, in print so small I had to use Ember’s pre-K magnifying glass when we got home, there is a list. Seventeen items. Four of them are wood.

Let me say that again. Four. Of them. Are wood.

The other thirteen, as far as I have been able to determine between Caro, my sister-in-law Heather (front desk, pediatric urgent care, Hendersonville, basically a nurse), and the admins of a Facebook group called Briquettes & The Lies They Pressed Into Pillow Shapes, are as follows: limestone. Borax. Mineral char. Sodium nitrate. A “binder starch” from an undisclosed grain. A “lighting agent.” Something called borate-treated cellulose, which Heather says she has personally seen on an MSDS sheet at her cousin’s HVAC supply and which is, and I want you to read this carefully, attic insulation. We are grilling our Memorial Day brisket on attic insulation. Then there’s a coal-derived petroleum byproduct, two compounds I cannot pronounce, a “flavor enhancer” (on a piece of pressed dust, you cannot make this up), and the last three are listed only as “proprietary,” which is what a company writes when the answer would make a mother cry in a parking lot.

I want to be clear, because I have already gotten one email from a man named Greg: I am not anti-grill. My husband Trent has a brisket tradition. He gets up at 4 a.m. on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, he puts on the same sweatshirt he wore the day Ember was born, and he tends a fire on our back patio for fourteen hours while listening to a podcast about the Civil War. That ritual is sacred in this house. What is not sacred is what we have apparently been asking him to put under that brisket for nine years, which according to my best math is roughly 180 pounds of compressed industrial floor sweepings and a binder starch from Who Knows Where, Kansas.

Now. I will say. Lump charcoal is a different conversation, and I want to give it its due. Lump is just hardwood that has been burned down in a low-oxygen kiln. That is fire-and-tree, the way God and the Cherokee intended. The carveout I am willing to make for lump is real. The only catch is that the bag has to say where the wood came from, by county, and if it just says “South America” in a script font I am putting it back on the shelf and apologizing to it. Heather says her cousin once opened a bag of “premium hardwood lump” and found a piece of a pallet with a staple still in it, and I have not been able to unhear that.

So this year I have made arrangements. Our neighbor Marcus, who runs a small wood lot off Old Fort Road and who once hand-split a cord of cherry for a wedding, is letting me come fill the back of the Subaru with what he calls “clean rounds” — oak and hickory and a little applewood, all from trees he watched grow. Trent is going to build a fire from actual identifiable trees, on a grate he wire-brushed himself, in a bed of ash from last summer’s fires that I have personally screened for staples. Will it take longer? Yes. Will the brisket taste like brisket and not like a CVS receipt? I believe so.

I floated all of this at the HOA cookout planning meeting on Thursday and there was a silence I have only heard one other time in my life, which was when I told the PTA the gown was a tablecloth. A woman named Patrice asked if I was “doing a thing again.” I said I was not doing a thing, I was doing a fact, and there is a difference, and she could read the back of her own bag in her own garage. The meeting moved on to the bouncy house deposit.

If you take nothing else from this column, take this: turn the bag around. Read every word. If you see “proprietary,” put it down. If you see “borate,” put it down and also wash your hands. If you see four kinds of wood and nothing else, you have my blessing and Marcus’s, and Trent will be in the driveway at 5 a.m. on Saturday with the sweatshirt and the thermos and the look of a man who finally knows what is under his meat.

Ember asked me at bedtime if briquettes were bad. I told her they were not bad, exactly. I told her they were a choice we used to make before we knew. She nodded the way she does, and she said, very seriously, “Mama, the wood remembers.” Reader, I do not know where she gets it. But she is not wrong.

Clayborn County High’s 47 Graduating Seniors Will Receive Diplomas Beneath a Stuffed Walleye After Gym AC Quit Tuesday in a Manner Described as ‘a Long Sigh, Then Nothing’

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County High’s 47 Graduating Seniors Will Receive Diplomas Beneath a Stuffed Walleye After Gym AC Quit Tuesday in a Manner Described as ‘a Long Sigh, Then Nothing’

CLAYBORN, IA — The 47 members of Clayborn County High School’s Class of 2025 will cross the stage Friday evening at American Legion Post 114, after the high school gymnasium’s central air unit gave out during Tuesday’s processional rehearsal at a temperature that maintenance superintendent Dale Vorhees described as “the kind of hot that makes a folding chair feel personal.”

Principal Janelle Aud made the call Wednesday morning, after the gym registered 94 degrees by 10 a.m. and the unit — a 1998 Trane the district has been “monitoring” for nine years — produced a sound recorded in the emergency report as “a long sigh, then nothing.”

“We considered the parking lot,” Aud said, “but the asphalt is 116 degrees and Mrs. Peterson reminded us that two of our seniors wear corrective footwear. The Legion was generous, and the Legion was air-conditioned, and at this point those are the only two qualities I am screening for.”

The Legion’s main hall seats 138, which has forced the district to cap each graduate at two adult guests — a limit Brittany Hollencamp’s mother is currently appealing to the school board on the grounds that her ex-husband and his new wife both expect to be in photographs and cannot, under any circumstances, be in the same photograph. Graduates will process past the bar, the coin-op pool table, and a backlit Hamm’s sign that Post Commander Wendell Britt has agreed to “try to unplug, no promises.”

Mrs. Peterson, who has attended every Clayborn County High graduation since 1981, said the Legion had “real character” and that she had last been inside in 1994 for a wedding reception that she said “did not take.” Senior class president Tyler Boemecke, reached at the Casey’s where he was buying ice for the ceremony, said the venue itself was fine but he had concerns about the lectern. “There’s a stuffed walleye over my head,” Tyler said. “I have to give a speech under a fish.”

Salutatorian Maddie Voll has reportedly cut a passage from her remarks that began “In this gymnasium, where so many of us first…” and replaced it with a shorter passage that does not. Voll declined to share the new opening but confirmed it makes no reference to either the gymnasium or the walleye, which she said she had been advised against acknowledging.

The Friday evening start time, pushed back from 2 p.m., is itself a concession to the heat dome that has parked over the eastern half of the state and which the National Weather Service in Davenport has been describing in increasingly resigned language. Forecaster Lyle Kremke on Thursday called the pattern “persistent,” “stubborn,” and finally, in the 5 p.m. update, “just kind of how it is now.”

Vorhees, the maintenance superintendent, said the Trane could likely be repaired by August, in time for the start of the next school year, and added that the district was already “deep into conversations” about a long-term replacement, the most serious of which, as of Thursday afternoon, involved a ceiling fan.

Heat Dome Arrives Three Weeks Early, Tells Reporters It Just Wanted to ‘Beat the Memorial Day Traffic’

Tara Sparks
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Heat Dome Arrives Three Weeks Early, Tells Reporters It Just Wanted to ‘Beat the Memorial Day Traffic’

PHOENIX, AZ — The 2025 summer heat dome touched down Thursday morning at a brisk 109 degrees, telling reporters at a hastily assembled tarmac press gaggle that it had decided to come in early because it ‘didn’t want to deal with the Memorial Day rush’ and was ‘kind of over’ last summer’s vibe.

The dome, which forecasters had not expected until the second week of June, was first photographed at approximately 6:47 a.m. unloading a duffel bag of stagnant air mass over a Tempe Arby’s, three full weeks ahead of its scheduled arrival and visibly annoyed that the Best Western had not yet honored its early check-in request.

‘We tried to reschedule. We offered it a softer June window with full media support,’ said Dr. Renata Vasquez-Plenn, an atmospheric scientist with the Sonoran Climate Institute. ‘It said it had already booked the PTO, the dog was at the kennel, and frankly it didn’t want to lose its deposit. At a certain point you just have to let a high-pressure system live its truth.’

Target had already pivoted by 9 a.m., rolling out its newly accelerated ‘Surrender Summer’ collection, which features an $89 linen misting caftan, a $42 cooling neck towel branded ‘The Wet Friend,’ and a patio umbrella that ships pre-collapsed in the box because, per the product description, ‘we both know where this was headed.’ The chain confirmed it had moved Memorial Day signage in front of the kiddie pool display and quietly relocated the kiddie pools to a locked cage behind customer service, where they are now being rationed at one per household with valid Arizona ID.

A CVS manager in central Phoenix told reporters that three customers had been ‘living near the freezer aisle since Tuesday’ and that the store had stopped asking questions, though it had begun gently rotating them out for restocking. ‘They brought a Roomba,’ she said. ‘They named it. I’m not getting in the middle of it.’

On TikTok, the early arrival immediately spawned a ‘Heat Dome Girl Summer’ trend, which has already amassed 412 million views and consists primarily of women in their late twenties lying motionless on bathroom tile, staring into the middle distance, and describing the experience as ‘thermo-grounding,’ ‘a soft hot girl reset,’ and, in one viral entry, ‘finally being held by something that means it.’ A licensed wellness influencer with 1.3 million followers has begun selling a $58 PDF guide titled *Letting the Dome In*, which is reportedly just the phrase ‘drink water’ rendered in twelve different fonts.

Climate researchers expressed concern that the heat dome’s increasingly proactive scheduling represents a worrying behavioral shift, noting that previous domes had at least pretended to be reluctant. ‘This one walked in like it owned the lease,’ said Dr. Vasquez-Plenn. ‘It asked where the thermostat was. We don’t have one. It seemed personally offended.’

Reached for comment late Thursday, the heat dome had already left a four-star Yelp review of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area praising the ‘consistent ambient warmth’ and ‘eager hospitality from local infrastructure,’ but docking one star for parking and what it described as ‘a slightly defensive energy from the local news anchors, who could stand to relax.’

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