Yesterday it was over 30 C……in the house. I was actually sweating sitting still. As I sweltered, I remembered a certain Canadian telling me about the beautiful summer weather here in Alberta. The low relative humidity and basically milder temperatures in comparison to the sauna days of an Iowan summer. Yeah, that was all crap. It is just as nasty hot up here in the Great White North as every other place on this globally cooked planet. The difference between the Midwest and the western Provinces, though, is that back in the States we aren’t in denial about the weather. We have air-conditioned homes and here, the Edmonton paper gives people tips on how to use ice and fans to cool down rooms. 

Rob refers to me as a “weenie” when it comes to the heat. I take a tiny bit of exception to that. Until I bought my first home back in ’97, I had never had central air in my home or at work. The school buildings I worked in were old and barely had working heating systems, so AC was a fantasy. I can remember being nearly 8 months pregnant and simply informing my principal that he would need to find someone to cover my afternoon classes because the temperature in my classroom was well over 90, and I was going home. He simply replied, “Have a nice weekend.” Back in the days when my asthma was fairly mild, I loved to go for evening runs in the summer when it was so hot and humid it felt like being wrapped in a damp, steamy towel when you stepped outside. Sweat would be trickling down my arms and legs before I hit the end of the first block. It was nothing to knock out five or six miles on those runs and this was after a day spent at the pool with my friend and her young daughters. Swimming and diving. My summer wardrobe consisted on shorts and halters or bikini tops. I may have been born during the winter, but I was a summer baby at heart.

It was my asthma that killed my love of the dog days. Humidity of any kind is akin to slow suffocation. The accompanying congestion and coughing sent me in search of indoor activities and climate controlled venues. There is no AC  in the house where we are currently living, and to be fair it would be a waste of resources to install it. Heat waves here are short-lived, generally, and are an infrequent enough occurrence that people just ride them out. Kind of like we used to back in Dubuque when I was a kid. If it weren’t for the asthma, I would be less of a “weenie” (actually that is “weenie princess” according to my beloved who followed up that assessment of me with kisses and proclamations of how cute, lovable and utterly desirable it makes me.)  

Eddie and Brenda from across the street came over the other day to introduce themselves as I sat on the shaded front steps watching my daughter frolic under the Dora sprinkler. As is natural among the newly acquainted, the topic of weather came up. I was assured by both that the current baking we are receiving is not typical of a Canadian summer at this latitude. Not typical. Maybe not in the past. I think that it will likely become more the norm though, and that our next house is going to be centrally air-conditioned. (Rob says we are just going to keep moving north.)