Weather Mand

Can anyone tell me what the weather is like around here?

I’m not kidding: I’ve forgotten what it is supposed to be like.
I remember as a kid spending time in Holyoke, thinking the weather there was perfect in the summer.
My grandfather was a supervisor in the Water Department in Holyoke: it was largely a ceremonial role, I believe, giving him the authority to take my brother and me fishing in the town’s reservoir whenever he wanted.
Maybe I am mistaken, but as I remember it Indian Summer lasted all summer long then: warm days, dry and deliciously cool nights.
I also remember swimming all day, eating at least a dozen ears of corn at one sitting, and then sitting on my grandparents’ screened porch and playing Scrabble until every word in the dictionary had been used and we all just sat there in the early evening light, speechless.
Now that was weather!

I guess I always believed that New England –from one end to the other, was just like that.
But we didn’t really live in New England then – we were just visiting.
Remember when local newspapers would print who was on vacation, and who had relatives visiting? Were we actually that safe then, or just a little more naive?
I was actually born in Massachusetts, in Chicopee Falls ( a pretty name, but Westover Air Force Base in point of fact), and later lived for two years in Bangor, Maine. While my memory of the Connecticut River Valley is idyllic, my memories of Bangor winters are different, so I don’t think I am simply being nostalgic.
And both western Massachusetts and Bangor had what I remember as predictable climates.

I have lived here in Plymouth for over twenty years now, and I have no sense of what the weather is supposed to be like, season to season.
Is that because here on the coast we don’t –and never have, had consistent weather?
I get the sense it’s something else: not exactly what you might think of as the effect of Global Warming, but maybe part of that phenomena.

My wife came home a few hours after sunset the other day –during this recent stretch of brutal humidity, and when she got out of her air-conditioned car she looked like something out of a Charlie Chan movie: her glasses were completely fogged over.
Inscrutable, was the word the war-time movie propagandists used to describe the impending ‘yellow peril’.
This weather is inscrutable.

This oppressive humidity reminds me of the kind of weather I got used to, growing up in the Washington D.C. area. The summers in Washington are consistently hot and humid –double nineties are not unusual: but because it is so predictably uncomfortable from June to September every building is fully air-conditioned.
In July in the D.C. area it can be 77 by 7, 88 by 8, and in the nineties by the time the sweating, aluminum-clad snack trucks begin arriving at construction sites.
But you can learn to live with anything, if you know what to expect.
Here, though the coastal waters often moderate the cold, the homes are still built to withstand the temperatures and cost of winter: the houses insulated so well that, when we get this kind of humidity, traditional colonial-style, wooden homes are swollen with the heat that can’t escape.
If this continues, and the wood keeps swelling up, you could see dozens of gray and white gambrels break free of their foundations and float off, east, like Dorothy headed for Oz.
Actually I don’t think I would mind that. It’s probably a bit cooler, up a few thousand feet.

It’s so humid the fireflies can’t light their little torches.
It’s so humid the mosquitoes can’t hold on long enough to bite.
It’s so humid you can put a teabag in an empty cup and, in an hour or two, voila!
It’s so humid I can’t remember what the weather is supposed to be like ‘round here’.