It is, quite literally, hotter than it’s ever been right now. Walking outside is like having a damp weighted blanket thrown on me. Where I’m “from” it’s typically dry and cold, so my current home’s wet heat is hard for me to handle. Then again, I’m not really “from” anywhere—my dad is in the military and our family moved a lot, though I didn’t move as much as some other military brats. I won’t get into the gory details of all of the places I’ve ever lived, but most of them were cold.
In Germany, being under a gray sky and a soft chill qualified as “German sunshine.” It was and is my favorite kind of weather. I remember with strange vividness the first time I felt brave enough to take my shirt off on a pleasantly cold day while I ran through the woods for cross country practice. I can see myself as if from the third person, shirt balled in my hand, navigating tree roots as I run. There’s a friend whose name I don’t remember running beside me. I can remember how I met him, though: he jumped from the top of a stairwell in our school and landed right in front of me, narrowly missing falling on top of me. He was, in a word, weird. Memorable, though, clearly. It’s been over a decade.
It’s easiest to say that I’m from Colorado. It’s where I lived before this, so technically I did come “from” there. Blizzards and summer thunderstorms were the worst weather one had to cope with on a semi-regular basis. There are definitely still thunderstorms in Texas in the winter and spring, but the blizzards have been swapped for tornadoes. Tornado warnings freak me out in a way that blizzards never really did. The long-term damage feels like it would be more dramatic, I think, even though I’ve been lucky enough to never experience it (yet).
A good portion of my written work involves snow in some way or another. The capability to be both beautiful and deadly is something that I enjoy a lot. It’s the same reason I love owls. And cats of both the big and house variety.
Heat can cause death, for sure, but it doesn’t feel pretty in the slicing way that cold does. Hot or even warm weather tends to make me sleepy. I like taking naps in the sun. I’m particularly prone to falling asleep if I’m on a boat, even/if not especially when I’m being splashed by water. And yet, I woke up in the middle of the night last night because I was uncomfortably warm. Where’s the sense in that? Then again, I don’t tend to be on boats very often, and I have to sleep in my bed every night…
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