switch

In the past few days, it's like a switch has been thrown, and it's finally autumn.

We've gone from days where it gets up into the 90s, with high humidity, and little cool-down at night to days where it's cooler, dryer, and it gets sort of chilly at night.

(I have to say for me, the hardest thing to take, living where I live? Nights that don't cool down. When I lived in Ohio, we used to get some hot days - even hot, humid days - in the summer. But at night it would often drop into the fifties (or at least lower sixties) and it would cool off and the mornings would feel nice. Here, in the summer, mornings often feel like getting slapped by a warm, wet towel. And not a clean towel, either.)

The drier air gets rid of a lot of the stink. One of the things I dislike about humidity is that it seems to hold a lot of smells close to the ground- the diesel exhaust from my neighbors' duallie (and please, don't leave the thing idling in your drive; not only is it loud but it smells), the smells of cooking grease from the Dairy Queen a couple blocks away, the smashed skunk out on the main road. I have a very sensitive nose and there are humid days where I feel like I'm constantly being assaulted with new stinks.

It also gets cooler at night, which is wonderful. I am sleeping much more soundly. I always realize in the fall that I spent a lot of the summer kind of bungling along in a sleep-deprived state. Even with air conditioning, it's really not possible to suck enough humidity out of the summer air, or cool it down enough, to make sleeping easy. In the summer, I wake up every couple hours or so. In the fall and winter, I sleep pretty solidly through the night.

Also, it's QUIETER when it's cooler out at night. Just this past week I realized something - I wasn't hearing the boom cars in the neighborhood any more. Either the owners of the cars have decided that they have to keep their windows rolled up - and even for a boom car owner, I suppose there's a volume that's "too loud" - or they've decided that cruising isn't fun when it's chilly. And I welcome that because every night there had been someone driving through the neighborhood around 11:30 pm - just after I had first dropped off to sleep.

And my neighbors with their new bark-and-whine puppy seem to be keeping it indoors now.

And cooking is more fun when it's chilly out. When it's hot, you don't want to eat much other than salads, and the thought of heating up the kitchen by turning on the stove is unappealing. But when it's cold out, soup sounds good, chili sounds good, doing things in the slow-cooker sounds good. (I bought some country-style ribs the other day; I'm going to put them in the slow cooker shortly so they will be done for dinner tonight). It's pleasant to cook, it's pleasant to nourish yourself. Food becomes more than simply fuel.

Reading also takes on an added dimension of pleasure - curling up on the couch with a huge book and a mug of tea and a quilt, or piling up all the pillows in bed and putting on flannel jammies to read.

It's always a huge relief to me when the heat breaks. I begin to feel alive again.