Rain

I’m feeling the swamp vibe this year.  Or possibly rainforest.  How much does it have to rain to qualify as rainforest? It rains every day.  Morning, afternoon, evening, overnight.  It can spend an entire day doing nothing but sprinkling all day long, which is a bit like Chinese water torture from the heavens.  None of the rain comes with any really interesting weather. It just melts across the sky and seeps into everything, leaving a yard full of mushrooms in its wake.

The dew point outside as I write is 69°F and the temperature is 72°F, for a relative humidity of 89%.  If you’ve never lived in a humidity of 89% (or been to Houston or Florida), imagine going into a sauna and never being able to leave.  I drip sweat sitting at my vanity in the morning trying to pluck my chin hairs.  I drip sweat sitting in my living room knitting.  I feel like I’m being generous by setting the thermostats at 74, but I’m still dripping sweat, dripping because it’s not evaporating.

I’ve described stepping outside in Austin in the summer as being like getting wrapped in a warm blanket, maybe one of those blankets in the NICU that they keep in little warmers and bring out to cozy over you and your baby, like warming your toes in front of a fire.  Stepping outside here in Michigan right now is like stepping into a bathroom that somebody has been taking a steamy shower in for the past 30 minutes.  You breathe but you can’t feel the air going into your lungs because the moisture content of the air is exactly the same as inside your body.  There’s no wind, no sensation of movement at all.

I’ll still take this over freezing my toes off, over spending 4 months without ever feeling warm all over.  It is hard, though, to remember those months when sweat is pooling between my glasses and my cheeks, waiting to run down my chin whenever I twitch, when my hair is never, ever dry, when the mosquitoes and the flies are buzzing about in little clouds of menace.  I look at the forecast for hope, but the dew point is not forecast to drop below 50 all week long.  50 is a little better than 69, but its a long way from 20.

A road trip sounds so good right about now.