This is Summer?
My husband this year collected a lot of firewood for the winter. We hired a splitting machine and those logs were splintered lickety spit in two days. At a much better rate and less cost of muscle than if my husband were to have done it all by hand over the entire summer. Well, the firewood was intended for the coming winter, but we've had to start the pile already. In August.
While July may have been the hottest month on the planet so far since record-keeping began, in our little corner it was a normal month. It and June were a bit dry, so some areas were worried. Mostly along the coastal stretch the temperatures were normal or a little under average, though we had the usual few days of wising for an air conditioner. In the interior they followed the national average this year - broiling! So when August rolled around we thought we'd have more of the same. No.
Except for about six or seven scattered days at the beginning and last week, including a couple the pyromaniacs decided to torch as many woods as possible around Santiago, it's been cloudy or rainy, and cool. Today is the first day since Monday that we see the sun. About time, I have tons of clothes to wash and no dryer. We had to light the fire to be able to dry a few items of necessary clothing. And then people say climate change is a chimera designed to strike fear into people.
People have the mistaken idea that global warming means hot sunny weather more of the time and less rainfall or snowfall. Global warming is an insidious intruder, taking away and changing things right before your eyes so cleverly you don't see anything. If you mention climate change to too many uninformed people, they will deny it's happening because they expect to see something along the line of disaster films. They think it would mean an ice age beginning and spreading in two weeks, or enormous floods wiping out ocean-side cities in five hours. If we look at the weather last year and compare it to this year, that doesn't say anything. If the oldest among us (I'm talking sixty and up.) look back on weather in their childhood and compare it to weather now, they will see a difference. I see a difference here in just twenty years. When I first moved here fruit trees didn't blossom until March. In the past years they've been blossoming in February. And if not every year, in most years they're blossoming earlier and earlier. Summer used to be very pleasant in this corner (it still is when it wants to). A few days in the nineties, most in the eighties. Around the middle of July and August there would be some days with rainshowers or fog. Generally those days would fall during the feast days of a neighboring parish and ours. When September would come by the first half would still be nice, but then it would cool down, and by October the first rainstorms with driving rain and high winds would hit us. And the everlasting fall-winter-spring would be here to stay.
Now we can't be sure of the cycle that used to rule our activities. This August has been more like the end of September or beginning of October. These few past years we have gone to the beach in October. We have been wearing short sleeves in December some years. And these things are happening more frequently.
Our shores are being eroded, too. Some beaches have gotten so eroded in winter storms that they disappeared. Sand had to be brought in to recreate them. There is nucleus of houses a few kilometers away along our shoreline that are right on the sea. A couple of years ago half of the lane that runs between their houses and the sea was swallowed by the waves. A landfill eventually repaired it, but neighbors recalled that maybe fifty years ago the sea was further out, and some of them had fields that they had tilled on the other side of the lane, where the fish now swim.
I suppose as time goes on I'll have to get used to summers that aren't the summers I used to remember, and autumns disguised as summer. I don't like the idea.
While July may have been the hottest month on the planet so far since record-keeping began, in our little corner it was a normal month. It and June were a bit dry, so some areas were worried. Mostly along the coastal stretch the temperatures were normal or a little under average, though we had the usual few days of wising for an air conditioner. In the interior they followed the national average this year - broiling! So when August rolled around we thought we'd have more of the same. No.
Except for about six or seven scattered days at the beginning and last week, including a couple the pyromaniacs decided to torch as many woods as possible around Santiago, it's been cloudy or rainy, and cool. Today is the first day since Monday that we see the sun. About time, I have tons of clothes to wash and no dryer. We had to light the fire to be able to dry a few items of necessary clothing. And then people say climate change is a chimera designed to strike fear into people.
People have the mistaken idea that global warming means hot sunny weather more of the time and less rainfall or snowfall. Global warming is an insidious intruder, taking away and changing things right before your eyes so cleverly you don't see anything. If you mention climate change to too many uninformed people, they will deny it's happening because they expect to see something along the line of disaster films. They think it would mean an ice age beginning and spreading in two weeks, or enormous floods wiping out ocean-side cities in five hours. If we look at the weather last year and compare it to this year, that doesn't say anything. If the oldest among us (I'm talking sixty and up.) look back on weather in their childhood and compare it to weather now, they will see a difference. I see a difference here in just twenty years. When I first moved here fruit trees didn't blossom until March. In the past years they've been blossoming in February. And if not every year, in most years they're blossoming earlier and earlier. Summer used to be very pleasant in this corner (it still is when it wants to). A few days in the nineties, most in the eighties. Around the middle of July and August there would be some days with rainshowers or fog. Generally those days would fall during the feast days of a neighboring parish and ours. When September would come by the first half would still be nice, but then it would cool down, and by October the first rainstorms with driving rain and high winds would hit us. And the everlasting fall-winter-spring would be here to stay.
Now we can't be sure of the cycle that used to rule our activities. This August has been more like the end of September or beginning of October. These few past years we have gone to the beach in October. We have been wearing short sleeves in December some years. And these things are happening more frequently.
Our shores are being eroded, too. Some beaches have gotten so eroded in winter storms that they disappeared. Sand had to be brought in to recreate them. There is nucleus of houses a few kilometers away along our shoreline that are right on the sea. A couple of years ago half of the lane that runs between their houses and the sea was swallowed by the waves. A landfill eventually repaired it, but neighbors recalled that maybe fifty years ago the sea was further out, and some of them had fields that they had tilled on the other side of the lane, where the fish now swim.
I suppose as time goes on I'll have to get used to summers that aren't the summers I used to remember, and autumns disguised as summer. I don't like the idea.
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