Feels Like Home

Several weeks ago our friend J emailed us from Austin and told us that the weather would be hot and dry. He moved here from London in January, and in his experience, this was absolutely true. In fact, just around the time of the email, it was so hot that he couldn't sleep, as he and his wife C hadn't yet bought a fan. A week or so after J's email, a few days before we came here, C emailed and said, essentially, "just to be on the safe side, and so you think of us as a truth-telling couple, I'm going to say that it will be cold and rainy for your visit. That way we will have all the bases covered." At the time it was 86 in Austin, and we were very much looking forward to some hot dry air to clear our sinuses and kill the moss growing between our toes.

Well. A couple days before leaving for Austin, we started monitoring the weather, and lo and behold, C was on track to be right. Temperatures in the 40s, rain showers. There was a possibility of clearing Sunday, and temperatures in the low 70s, and maybe slightly warmer on Monday, but the forecast for those days was far enough away to be truly theoretical. The day before we came, we exchanged a few more emails with C, who declared her extreme annoyance with J for causing the rain by claiming it wouldn't happen, and hinted that we would be spending all our extra indoor time doing some intensive marriage counseling.

In the event, it is actually cold and rainy here. It's in the 40s, and it's wet. Of course, everywhere I've gone in the last three months the weather has been essentially the same, both places that I'd expect this to be true (Portland, Oregon), and places that I really wouldn't (Santa Cruz, Austin, and even Hawaii—where, okay, it wasn't 40, but it was rainy and cold for there).

I suppose the irony is that Seattle weather actually hasn't been endlessly, mind-crushingly like that this year—we've had a lot of snow, and a lot of bright sunny days, and a lot of "serious" cold (like, hovering around freezing). Last year was pretty much 42 and gray for six months, but this year has felt like a real winter, not just an exercise in stoicism.

Good thing I've been traveling.