Word in Edgeways

Weather report

As a child, the changing seasons never had much of an effect on me. Perhaps because all seasons in England are wet, there was never much to look forward to. I’m exaggerating of course; I had summer wear and winter wear, the separation maintained fastidiously by my mother, who carefully stowed woolies and shorts, coats and cotton dresses, according to season, in thick polythene bags in the top of my wardrobe. The woolens had to go away to keep them from the greedy, warm weather moths; the cottons because you had to make way for the woolens. It made a certain sense, even though winter snow fell in London only once during my childhood, and more than two weeks of dry, hot weather one 1970s summer led to drought warnings, and the appointment of a special government minister.

I can’t complain about the summers in my present home in the Pacific Northwest. They are quite wonderful, really, not too hot and not too humid for the most part, although there are exceptional days of raw heat that have been depressingly more common in the last two years or so, but more than enough weeks of balmy warmth balance them out. Of course, it rains the rest of the time, but when you know with a high degree of certainty that you will have a genuine reason to buy (and wear) sunscreen from mid-July until mid –September, it’s really not so much to put up with.

I look forward to summer now, and wait eagerly for the appearance of spring leaves and an uptick in the thermometer. And as summer fades, I concur with what my mother tells me was the annual lament of my grandfather when autumn began to close in: “Comes August, comes night.” Odd then, that I should get depressed in summer more often than at any other time of year.

I’m still not quite sure why. After all, the longer days and ample sunshine should surely raise my spirits. I think it is because I have so many plans for summer – trips to take, projects to do with the children, essays to write (I teach from late August to June), picnic spots to visit, papers to sort, flowers to tend, recipes to try – far too much to cram into summer’s small mason-jar. I shouldn’t give myself so much to do, of course, but part of the thrill of anticipating summer is the planning and proposing, the wishing and the wondering of what I might accomplish if I could, for once, get it right.

I am the kind of person who suspects she will fly like an old duck south for retirement, assuming I could ever finish all the packing in the summers between now and then. The best winters I have ever spent were in India, at least far enough to the south to escape the occasionally crisp northern nights for which no-one is ever prepared (a request once for something to warm up my room was met with a carbon monoxide-churning coal brazier, followed by an electric heating element from the kitchen). In the temperate zones, my birthday in February has typically been a bleak affair, passed in seething winds and soaking rains. In the few times it has fallen in India, it’s been 75 degrees, with a soft breeze. Who wouldn’t be happy with that?

posted by Sylvie @ 10:53 PM