It's currently the sweetest, softest Spring-into-Summer evening where I am... Great weekend so far. Biked the neighborhood yard sale Friday, collecting little treasures to give to the 1-3 year-olds we saw at brunch and a bbq today. Brunch hosted by someone we met when she was nine. BBQ hosted by our young neighbors, whose toddler is letting us try out being grandparents. Spring + humans vibing together is an amazing reminder of the reasons to be hopeful.
@mrcompletely The seasons when the line between inside and outside disappears are idyllic. I wouldn't want to live in San Diego, where this is always true; it's important to have the idyllic times arrive, after going away for a while. Spoken as a true Michigan boy.
@4CPcomics I agree, I like seasons. The ones here are complex, with the high level effects overlaid with maritime and mountain effects and the collisions between them, so we get a kind of fractal weather with lots of mini seasons. But we do get days and weeks that are as you describe, perfectly balanced and shimmering with beauty; and we do get pivot days, where the weather announces that the preliminaries are over, and the next change has arrived. I find all those times deeply satisfying
@mrcompletely Yes, this, exactly (though I'm in another climate zone). I lived in the south between the ages of ~24-44, and I think I had seasonal affective disorder the whole time. Three months of hard winter is comparatively energizing. A summer where the outside is welcoming is priceless.
@4CPcomics I grew up in the south and couldn't move away fast enough, though I kept blowing my money on shows so it took me longer than it should have. The weather was a lot of the reason
@mrcompletely Interesting to hear! I could easily imagine that the climate of wherever one grew up would become a lifetime baseline of normal and good.
@4CPcomics hell no. I was born with cheap Irish skin, totally unsuitable for sustained hot or dry weather. The climate out here is much like the British isles overall, especially these coastal regions with the rare temperate rainforest ecologies. I always felt like a stranger in a strange land in the south, and coming to Oregon was like being reborn in my true home. I miss some of the people but I'm not nostalgic for a single thing about the Carolina climate or culture.
@4CPcomics the climate there has gotten notably worse, while the culture has improved in some areas, which just draws the conflict closer to the surface, because the reactionary forces are so emboldened and insane these days. When I visit, I can't wait to leave.
@mrcompletely I visited Memphis last summer to reunite with my 1997-2008 peeps. Haven't been back to Durham, NC (1989-1997) in at least a decade. Insanely, I ended up teaching Southern Lit and African-American Lit in a Memphis college. Amazing carpet-bagger episode, but long enough.
@mrcompletely Nascent hipster Durham was where I lived 1989-1997, and it was really great. I'd come from Ann Arbor, which had just started to become a fashion-anxiety town, and the weirdness x unpretentiousness of Durham was very welcome.
@mrcompletely Also, Memphis was not "relatively sane." It was as riven and un-repaired as in 1968 and before. Truly a broken place where the entirety of US history continued to be apparent.
@mrcompletely I think Durham was probably equally broken in my time there, but there was a college town inside it, which was real, even if not representative of the whole.
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