© Greg Wasserstrom
Today was a beautiful day, the first real “winter day” of the winter – cold and white, with huge snowflakes drifting down from a gray sky. Today is disgusting. It’s about 20º warmer, which means all the snow on the ground has turned into disgusting slush and it’s raining. It makes me realize how much I love the summer. I’ve been thinking a lot about this past summer, my last in DC and getting nostalgic. I didn’t actually think I would miss anything about that place once I got to Brooklyn, but it turns out I miss everything. I wouldn’t want to live their again - it’s way too small - but I definitely miss the people, the scenery, and, this summer, the weather.
DC’s got horrible summers. It gets to be about 95º, it’s unbelievably muggy and the mosquitoes are like a scourge - they’re everywhere, and I happened to get these disgusting, enormous welts when they bite me. But I love it. It’s just like Houston, where I grew up; a town that gets even hotter and muggier and has even worse mosquitoes than DC. Now, for the first time, I’m living in a city that wasn’t built in a swamp. Houston and Washington were both built on land nobody wanted; DC because it was donated to by Maryland to be the Capital, and Houston because it was essentially where Galveston picked up and moved after being devastated by a Hurricane in 1900.
My point is this. I was walking down Flushing Ave in Brooklyn on a freezing night a couple weeks ago, wishing it was summer. And it hit me, as so many things have since moving here, that a lot of the atmospheric things I associate with the summer - the humidity, giant oak trees full with leaves and breeding mosquitoes, my friends standing around in somebody’s overgrown backyard wearing cutoffs and drinking beer, secadas chirping so loudly you almost can’t hear anything else - those things are all going to be different here, for the first time ever. Twenty-three years having one kind of experience is a long time. It’s a big change.
The hottest summer I’ve ever experienced was the one spent in New York in 2005. Even though Houston gets to be 108º at the peak of the heat in August, everywhere you actually go is so heavily air conditioned that you pretty much have to wear a hoodie indoors. Here, there’s no escaping the heat most of the time. There are parties on rooftops, bands playing in Prospect Park, trips to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It’s great, but obviously there’s nothing Southern it. It’s a whole new way of living.
This is a funny thing to be thinking about on such a slushy day in February. In Houston, I would complain about living in such a boring place that doesn’t have seasons. Now that I am, I can’t wait for them to change.
