Halcyon Days

August 13, 2020 — Pat Bertram

I try to take each day as it comes because that’s about all a person can do. I have no control over the weather (or anything else, for that matter) so it’s silly to waste time wishing for things to be different. Still, I am getting a bit tired of the heat. The highs are unvarying around one hundred degrees and have been for months. There might have been a day that slipped below ninety, but if so, I don’t remember.

I remember last year about this same time, I got tired of the heat then, too, and looked forward to cooler days. The high temperatures finally cooled into the high eighties and low nineties, and I waited for the seventy-degree days I was sure were coming. But they didn’t come. We slipped into the low eighties, returned to the low nineties for a few weeks, then dropped to the fifties and sixties. And then lower, of course, as winter moved in.

I was astounded at the drop. I know Colorado has — or at least had — a period of halcyon days where one could catch one’s breath after the heat and before the chill of winter. Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the weather patterns of this part of Colorado (living here a little over a year is hardly enough to enable me see any sort of seasonal pattern), but I am familiar with other parts of Colorado, and we always had a spate of windless 70-degree days in the early fall.

I don’t suppose it really matters — the temperatures change throughout the day, climbing to those flaming highs and dropping to the seventies and sometimes even sixties at night, so if I were to set my watch (assuming I had a watch) by temperature rather than solar hours, I would find my seventies.

Now that I’m working again, I have to pay attention to the time (though I have been setting my alarm when I get up in the morning so that I get a reminder when it’s time to get ready to go), but generally, I don’t pay attention to time. So I doubt I’d pay attention if I did have a watch that kept track of the ideal temperature. And anyway, things change, so the ideal temperature would probably have passed before I even noticed.

So what’s the point of this discussion? Nothing, really, though I suppose it reminds me to be grateful I haven’t anything more traumatic to talk about than the unremitting heat.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator