Sometime in late October it gets cold enough here that the motivation for turning on the gas heat grows strong. Generally, the thermostat gets left a little above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and will stay there for the whole Cold Half of the year.
The autumnal equinox as classically defined in northern Europe is thus shifted a month later in this southerly climate, and this pattern will hold true throughout the year.
We celebrate the winter solstice mindfully in December, but properly in local terms that should be January.
Spring also comes a month later, and is defined by the fact that it stops officially freezing at night, or dropping below 32 degrees anyway. That’s the point we’re at now in mid/late April. Today, sunny and very windy with a high of 78. Tonight, 35. On Monday it briefly spikes into the eighties, but a week from today they’re saying only 67–even so, that 67 is paired with a 36-degree pre-dawn.
So again, it’s supposed to be March that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but it’s April instead.
By late July, the regionally adjusted summer solstice, it’ll be hot, but not uninhabitably hot like down at one or two thousand feet. We’re almost a mile high and that means a saving grace of ten or fifteen degrees. I used to say you could count on ten days over a hundred, but as the climate fails it’s more like twenty.
The other saving grace is that many days will be marked by monsoon clouds building up in the afternoon and sometimes dropping blessed cooling rain that can briefly knock temperatures down into the low sixties.
I’ve lived through it all without AC, with only ceiling fans and windows open all night, shut tight against the solar warming as it returns in the dawn. But I did have a bathtub that year too, and dunking in it was a key part of the strategy as well.
By November we’ll be aching for that heat we cursed a few months before, and that’s the way of things.
The benefit of moving a little further south and going up a thousand feet is: cooler summers, with winters the same or even just a tiny bit warmer
Plus real trees. And the co-op for organics, one mile away instead of eighty-five. Fine coffee you don’t have to make yourself, necessarily. Birds.
Deer walking down Broadway in the nearly perfect stillness of a February night.