So Bay Area weather is essentially all it’s touted to be.
But my favorite thing about the weather here isn’t the perennially cloudless,
sunny days, or better yet, the transformative lack of humidity and mosquitos—it’s
the evenings. Every evening, the weather magically gets cooler and crisper. It
makes me want to breathe deep and wander long. It reminds me of that first
thrill of fall on the east coast, when months of oppressively muggy, hot days
finally give way to a brisk coolness that makes you want to open windows and
slip on long sleeves. Nearly every night here is like that. Dave used to go on
and on about how he loved as a child to open his bedroom windows and sleep to a
cool breeze, and I have to admit there is something to that.
One of the strangest things here is the lack of rain over
the summer. It rained and thunderstormed aplenty in Virginia: we got used to
radar-tracking storms to see how long thunder claps would keep the kids up from
their naps or sleeping at night; a small tornado uprooted one of our trees a
few months before we moved; we checked the weather app every day to figure out
how to dress, or whether to bring rain jackets to school. Plenty of times, I’d
forget to check in the rush to get the kids out the door, then groan when it
starts to pour and I’m not wearing my wellies or raincoat. I haven’t checked my
weather app once since moving here. Our chalk drawings stay on the sidewalk for
months. We leave toys out on the deck. It’s all rather bizarre.
The first novel I’m reading since the move is The
Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, a strange amalgam of science fiction,
Chinese history, theoretical mathematics and astrophysics, philosophical
treatise, and epic quest. My favorite part of it (spoiler alert) is considering
what life would be like if a planet existed in a stellar system with three
suns. Because of the mathematically unpredictable movement of the three suns, at
times the planet can be drawn into the orbit of one of the suns (at which time
the planet has regular day-night cycles and mild weather), and at other times
it cycles irregularly between them (resulting in completely unpredictable
cycles where nights can last for weeks, and deadly temperature extremes). The
planet can be far from all three suns (extremely cold conditions where it snows
water, then dry ice, then the atmosphere sort of congeals), can be exposed to
all three together (every living thing erupts into flames and the surface of
the entire planet becomes a lake of lava), can be affected by the gravitational
pull of all three suns in one line (all things and the atmosphere itself gets
sucked up into a vortex and pulled to the closest sun), or can collide with
some or all of the suns (splitting the planet in half and forming various rings
that later collapse, destroying all life).
The inhabitants have no control over these events or how
long various periods last, and the extreme weather often wipes out a
civilization with millions of years passing before another develops.
Civilizations devote their energies to trying to predict the motions of the
suns, before realizing it is impossible and deciding to leave their world
altogether.
I don’t understand the mechanics behind why the weather in
the bay area is always so mild and dry—why there are rarely ever clouds during
the day, or why the evenings are always perfectly cool—but it’s interesting to
mull on how completely it is all out of our control. One day I am going to stop
remarking on how nice the weather is here; it will just seem normal, much less
the fact that, well, I don’t have to worry about suddenly erupting into flames
when my planet gets too close to a few suns. But for now, I’m going to sit in
the mystery of it all a little bit, that of all places in the entire universe
and galaxy, I have landed upon a place where I can open my windows every night
to a cool breeze.
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