(Remember that hot and humid weather is not conducive to wearing a lot of clothes.) A night spent drinking under a pink sunset in a friend’s backyard would be followed up not with a hangover but with colonies of welts up and down my thighs and shoulders. Moments of domestic bliss spent tending my new garden turned to small nightmares when I looked down from my clippers to find a smattering of gray mosquitoes feasting on my calves. Woods on Dunkard Creek in southwestern Pennsylvania.īut within a week, I was in hell. In summer, one is constantly reminded, for better or for worse, that one inhabits a human body.
It is the sworn enemy of sleeves, bangs, and leather upholstery.
It is a dew point at 70 degrees, grass hot and lush, air so thick with humidity it almost quenches thirst. Summer is walking outside of your house and instantly glistening. It is also not true summer, at least not for anyone who grew up east of the Mississippi. Here is what happens in July: The clouds over coastal Washington dissipate, a brilliant sun bursts onto the scene with the carefree abandon of the girl at the Bat Mitzvah who just got her braces off, and the landscape becomes a kaleidoscope of sparkling topaz and emerald. “Wait until July,” they told me, smirking, as I shivered beneath a spitting late-May sky the exact same color as the sidewalk. When I, a born-and-bred Pennsylvanian, first moved to Seattle, I found that people in the Pacific Northwest like to talk about the summers by way of explaining why they live there. This story is part of the Grist series Coming to our Senses, a weeklong exploration of how climate change is reshaping the way we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world around us.