I was young, so it feels like something I read in a book sometimes. I remember how chilly it could get at night in the summer, which doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore.
That’s actually the thing that seems to keep popping back up in my mind - that like, it was really chilly in the mornings in summer even, and it would warm up, and it seems to just kind of… stay warm all the time.
I dunno. The seasons were more distinct, there were bigger temperature swings on individual days, and like… weather was more predictable on a seasonal basis, if not on a daily basis.
Like… the kind of seasons you read about in Olde Tyme Books? They… were real things. We didn’t always have snow on Winter Break, but we had a pretty predictable number of snow days?
And it almost feels silly to talk about it. “What were normal seasons like, Uncle Spider?”
Watch seasonal-based movies made before about 1975 – ones set around Easter, or Halloween, or New Year’s – and pay attention to what people are wearing. Late October? It got cold when the sun went down, like ‘put on a jacket’ cold and I’m not talking northern US, I’m talking Georgia.
Today (Aug 18) is only a week before the start of most public schools in the US. A week from now? Back then, it’d already be chilly in the morning, enough to need a windbreaker on the way to school. By midday it would’ve warmed up, but even in Georgia the mornings had a nip to them by end of August, start of September.
And in northern Virginia, not sure about now, but the schools used to plan for ten snow days a year. I recall one year we had eleven days off thanks to a foot or so of fresh snow every two or three days. Even in years we didn’t use all the snow days, there were still frequent late openings and early closings. It wasn’t all that uncommon for summer vacation to start a week later, because those days had to be made up, somewhere.
Locally, this summer has (despite the terrible heat elsewhere in the US) been a strange bit of callback to my childhood. Excepting two nights all summer, every night it’s dropped to 72F at the highest, but most often in the 60s – with the caveat that it sometimes took half the night to get there. It’s not a sharp drop like I remember, as a child. But at least it has been cool enough to leave the windows open and a fan on – and that’s the kind of summer I grew up with, in Alabama and Georgia (regions significantly warmer, otherwise, than the mid-atlantic where I live now).
That sharp drop was the reason my dad installed a whole-house fan every place we lived: because the evening air would legitimately drop a good 5-10 degrees as the sun set. Enough to open the windows, run the fan, and the whole house would cool right down by dinnertime.
Now? If we go by last summer, even having a house set up perfectly (central open staircase) for a whole-house fan, what’s the point if the temperature stays just as high after the sun goes down, as it was before?
I recently read a poem about climate change making the seasons less familiar in a poetry collection published in 1978.
I was like, excuse me? It was noticeable already? Obviously I know it’s changed in my lifetime, but…
so I was reading this book Travels in Alaska by John Muir and in it, he mentions visiting Glacier Bay and that within living memory of the locals, that Glacier Bay used to be entirely iced off, but that the seasons had been changing for the warmer and the ice was in retreat. he posits in the book that this might have something to do with people burning more coal.
I actually played outside as a kid in the summer in my hometown. I went to summer camps and hiked and swam in the river and would stay out all day with no issue. Now, it is nearly impossible to do that as it is physically unsafe. Almost every day has a heat advisory and even standing still outside for more than a few minutes can be dangerous. It’s mid-August and several days next week will be almost 100°F.
I’m going to pass out why does it look like the ending of a film where he’s finally accepted that Jimmy Buffet died and went to rainforest cafe heaven
I’ve been having a lot of feelings about the downfall of quality lately.
I ordered a pair of Dickies pants because pants are hard and workwear is usually reliable. When they arrived they were the scratchiest, most papery material–I can’t actually call it fabric in good faith–and fit a full three sizes too small. A week later I found the same pair in a thrift store, dated 2017. These are actual pants. They fit, they’re not made of asbestos. They’re only separated by time.
There’s no wood used in interior design unless it’s a custom build. I have a set of wealthy relatives who live in a condo. The downpayment for it was likely more money than I will see in my lifetime. The floors and the cabinets are all still laminate. I know I will never see real wood in a building constructed after 2000. Every “apartment hack” I see online has this very conspicuous, flat appearance because of all the paint and contact paper required to make these builds look personal in any way. The only natural materials are in the furnishings.
I’ve been harping on this for years, but everything is shit, nothing is designed to work, and “growth” and “profit” are just euphemisms for cutting corners until things are unworkable.
