August Heat

This past week will be remembered in January as the week it was hot. Not that the temperature was so high. It was the air so saturated with moisture that every evening as it cooled, it rained. Traditional August in Minnesota means brown lawns. Not this year! We are as verdant green as an English countryside.

The plants in my garden are confused. Spring came almost a month sooner. Some  plants bloomed early that mature in sync with the number of days after it thaws. Other plants,which time themselves with the patterns of shifting daylight hours, decided to keep their usual schedule. The result - the usual progression of flowers in the garden was replaced by a new order. Checking the garden after breakfast often meant surprises.

I know there are places where weather is a non-issue. San Jose, Costa Rica is a city of perpetual spring. When I was there near the Panama border, I remember trying to explain "cold" to people who had never been cold.- and the concept of "furnace" was incomprehensible. Perhaps if I had spoken Spanish . . .

Other places depend on the regularity of dry seasons and rainy seasons. Birds migrate to places they find suitable for breeding and to winter. Arctic Terns celebrate summer twice each year, breeding in the Arctic summer and returning to oceans around Antarctica for the southern hemisphere's summer. They live most of their lives in perpetual daylight.

When weather patterns don't perform on schedule, it is not only the plants who are confused. We are creatures of habit, influenced by the geography of home with its accompanying seasons. The winter when it did not snow in Minnesota meant a lot of anxiety and "craziness" by March, despite blessed relief from snow-shoveling. It was not a good year for cross-country skiing. Or hardware stores selling snow shovels.

We camped one summer in eastern Washington. The family next to us slept out under the stars and proclaimed that living in western Washington with so much rain must be unbearable. Later we stood in the mist by the railing of a ferry crossing Puget Sound. The family standing next to us declared how intolerable it must be to have to live in the arid eastern part of the state.

And there was the woman at the B&B where we stayed on the western coast of Vancouver Island. She confessed to us that she loved her husband dearly  - and he loved the temperate rain forest of the Island where he had lived all his life. But she found the lush woods claustrophobic - trees dripping with moisture and the forest floor carpeted with moss, ferns, and decaying logs. Sometimes at night, she said she would go down to the shore and stand. She would look out over the open Pacific, and remember her native Saskatchewan prairie. She would breath deep the wide open space of the immense ocean stretching uninterrupted all the way to Asia. Then she would climb back up the hill through the trees and slip into bed with her beloved.