Weather or Not

[kaffy_r]

Simmer Time
I have a friend at work who loathes - usually with energetic and colorful expletives - weather in which the temperature rises above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I  have another friend for whom the longest days of the year aren't complete until he has been able to bask in shimmering waves of 90-plus degree heat, like some gila monster spread out in happy torpor upon a flat desert rock.

If I tend to either end of the scale, it would have to be toward summer, because I have a distaste for winter that only a child forced to play in the snow because "it's good for you!" can muster. It's truly hard to appreciate the crisp and porcelain beauty of the season when one's wrists are wet and chapped with snow melted into uncomfortable ice pills inside one's mittens; when one's feet snap and ache with cold, and incipient chillblains.

Still, I must admit that coming to Chicago has changed me. Summers in Chicago are inevitably moist and oppressive - sweat-daubed and reeking with the fume-rich blanket of hot weather inversion that tans our particular urban skies too many days between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

In fact, ever since 1995, when a heat wave took hundreds of lives in Chicago*, (including my cat Rissa. Not, certainly, as tragic as the human victims, but a loss we mourned), summer has reminded me that spring and fall are really the only seasons I can truly love these days.

This is not to say that I don't occasionally still love summer. There's nothing like walking on a summer night and appreciating the cool and the summer stars. I also love barbecues, and I adore swimming, and those are most definitely summer time arts. But I don't get the chance to barbecue much these days, and I haven't been on a beach for decades. All of which is my own damned fault, but it does limit those few aspects of summer that I truly adore.

So why my anti-paean to hot and cold running weather?

Simple: I was reintroduced to Chicago summer today, caught in construction-clotted traffic in an AC-deficient car for oh, about a century at high noon, in 88 degree sunshine.

Oh, my, I do not like hot weather.

* This is how much that summer affected me.

Chicago, Summer, 1995

The storms, spawned like mosquitoes in the Gulf,
reached up and embraced us with heat this summer.
The dirty air lay over us, unable to rise.
The buildings labored and moaned to keep us cool
in the merciless downtowns.
We hated our clothing, hated our skins,
bathed uselessly.
We knew our sweat.
The air was thick with oil and garbage,
the effluvia of days that refused to end.
We woke to heat, walked in heat,
sank in it.
It defeated us.
We hid in airless caves, prayed for sundown.
Humid night followed cruel day and we were like children,
looking for kindness,
rewarded with nothing but another storm lingering on the lake's horizon.
Betrayed and bitter,
we leaned on our horns in the clotted intersections.
We clenched our fists
and closed our eyes.
We tasted stale salt on our upper lips,
slammed against the shimmering air, against each other
in realized desperation.
If the cool air had not surprised us,
the northern winds of final, blessed fall —
if the winds had not thinned our blood so that it ran in our veins again....
If we had not been able to breathe again,

we would have succumbed
and walked into the lake,
leaving empty streets echoing with the whine and snap of
useless air conditioners.

October 1, 1995

Comments

[kerravonsen]

(finds a Fahrenheit - Celcius conversion web-page)
Ah, 88F is 31C. Okay, I will concede that that is hot.

I was astonished the other day to find someone who thought that 22C (72F) was hot. For me, that's perfect mild weather. It isn't actually hot until it hits 27C (80F). But I consider anything below 17C (62F) to be cold. So, like you, Spring and Autumn seem to be the best times of year for me.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

When I was younger and willing to show my svelte (now morphed to beluga-like) body in public, I felt 25C was the perfect temp for sunbathing. Now that I am older and wiser I find that any temperature that is warm enough to keep my knees from aching, doesn't involve cold wet rain (which seems to set my sinuses off) but before the mosquitos take over the city is the best temperature.

[kaffy_r]

Bwah! You've hit it on the nose!

[scottish-vixen.livejournal.com]

Were they Scottish? Because I promise, temperatures of 22C here are rare things indeed. We're hot at 16C (61F)!

So I REALLY feel for you Mamma K. That heat probably would have killed me.

[kaffy_r]

The problem with heat, I find, is that one is simultaneously certain one is going to die, and afraid one is going to live through the next miserably sweat-drenched minute.

[kaffy_r]

Your friend with the super22C attitude is just like my friend, in whose honor I actually wrote the poem. My mother isn't really happy if it goes beyond 26C.