If You Insist on Being Alive, Today is a Relatively Adequate Day To Do So.

There exists such a thing as the quintessential Parisian Summer Day. It is not a myth. I know this because I’ve experienced it, in the flesh. You may have seen it portrayed in the paintings of Monet, or any movie filmed in Paris. I speak of Paris and consequently the north of the country, since below the Loire valley, the climate is progressively Mediterranean—more uniformly clement and luminous than the north, which cowers under a low, leaden blanket from late autumn to late spring. In the south, summer is the aggressor, kept at bay by shuttered windows, wide awnings and the afternoon siesta. In the north, it is welcomed with open arms, like a battalion of G.Is., the great liberator from oppression.

At dawn, a golden light infuses the room, waking you before the alarm with an anomalous sense of well-being, swathed in the still air like a bath of warm cotton. You can take your coffee on the balcony, imaging a day that will be decorated with young ladies in their summer dresses and less enticingly, young men in their tank tops, shorts and flip-flops—the vexing eye-candy to eye-sore Ying/Yang spectacle of summer. As the day progresses, the sky turns a deep Cerulean blue, tinged rose on the horizon beneath the bubble of high atmospheric pressure, with tufts of Cumulus clouds occasionally drifting by, for variety’s sake.

In the evening, you may also take your apéritif outside on the balcony or with friends, lingering at an outdoor café, watching the young ladies in their summer dresses (but I repeat myself). And linger you may, since in late June to mid-July, it remains light I the sky until 11 PM, by which time, with the setting of the sun, a cooling breeze passes.

But just exactly how does this climatic miracle occur? It begins when the phenomenon known as the Azores High sidles up to the coast of Portugal roundabout late spring, puffs out its chest and flexes its biceps, deflecting, with meteorological jiu-jitsu, the endless string of depressions that follow the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic up over Scotland and Scandinavia where they belong, dissipating any stragglers that might break through its defenses under the force of its impressive hectopascals and rippling millibars. In these, the best of times, continental Europe sits snug beneath a vast canopy of placid air and bright sunshine, sometimes for weeks at a time.

I’m writing all of this from memory, of course, since the past two months have been a dismal slump of chilly Seattlean drizzle, punctuated by the occasional gale. I don’t believe the temperature has risen above 65° F in all of August. Our onetime friend, the Azores High, has kept his distance of late, perhaps embarrassed by his weak and atrophied state. As a result, all of my clothes exude a tinge of mildew, the apartment is a dank perfume of wet dog, damp rug and musty drape. A bowl of peaches on the counter have passed from rock-hard to rotten without ever having lingered in a state of succulent and fragrant ripeness. An untouched loaf of bread has developed strains of mold yet undiscovered by science.

This has been our lot for the past five years or so. It stands in such stark contrast to the halcyon days I remember from the eighties and nineties. Granted, we had that heatwave in 2003, the one that “retired” so many of the retired, but it seems that was summer’s swan song for this generation as we settle in for a long, dark, bleak, cold and windy future. Just the other day, out in the country we took a short walk after lunch and returning soaked and shivering, so I lit a roaring fire. Sitting all together, huddled around the hearth, reading quietly in the milky light from the windows as steam rose from our soggy jeans, I had to remind myself that this wasn’t late November and we were bracing for the coming winter, but late-August, with a full month of summer yet to pass. I read that the Farmer’s Almanac is predicting that hell will freeze over this winter.

Oh well, what can you do? You can’t change the weather. Or the climate. Or the cycles of weather that define the climate. I was told by a cynical economics professor in High School that if the government could find a way to tax the air, they would. And as if by prophetic fulfillment, by golly, isn’t that what the world’s governments keep trying to do? You can’t change the weather, and try as you might, you can’t seem to ever change the growing bureaucracy, but I suppose that, for the time being at least, you can still move to the south.