Raining

It’s finally raining and the effect on the household is electric. The kids are tearing around shrieking and for the first time in months I’m enjoying hot tea without sitting under the air conditioner.

We’ve lived in perpetual summer for four years. Dubai only had three seasonal variations: hot, really hot and kids, come inside, your hair is on fire. And when we holiday in Canada in summertime it’s, well, summertime. “Gosh, what a winter we had!” people tell us when we arrive to cloudless blue skies and a molten sun. “You wouldn’t know it now but two weeks ago we had to tunnel through a ten-foot snow drift to get to the car. What amazing timing that you’ve arrived now — they just said on the news it’s going to be the hottest week in half a century.”

A particular weariness grips me at such times and I yearn for a cool, rain-spattered morning. I’d like to be able to do housework wearing something more than a bra. I want to curl up with a book under a blanket on a cold evening instead of bickering over the set point of the air conditioner with M, who believes that normal room temperature is 27 degrees C and anything cooler is just asking for pneumonia.

I’m not fool enough to actually wish to live somewhere cold, though. Like I was as a teenager on the farm in Alberta when I bitterly declared that I was going to get “as far away from here as possible.” I didn’t understand then the importance of being careful what you wish for.

No, without a lawyer beside me to put it into language that Fate cannot find a loophole around, I won’t wish for that. The company M works for doesn’t have an office in Greenland but if I start wishing for a cooler place you can bet your kids' inheritance that they’ll decide there ought to be an office in Greenland and that M is the just the man to run it.