Realizing the full extent to which this weather is not for everyone.

If you live in or around the tri-state area, you are a soggy thing most likely; it's been alternating between heavy rain and full-on downpours for over a week now. The nightly news looks like stock footage from the lesser-hit areas of the Gulf Coast; people standing in ankle-deep water on their raised front porches; semis hydroplaning through intersections before floating to a stop. All that stuff that happens in the North after a two month drought, after the soil has turned into concrete, absorbent as glass. The upshot? My normally flaky skin has an uncharacteristic dewy freshness. And we live on the second floor.

Since G and I long occasionally for the whole buy a house and have a family thing--something you can't do in New York City unless you're pulling down beaucoup bucks or are willing to settle for a two bedroom co-op in Hell for which you'd have to shell out 3/4 of your monthly earnings--we talk, sometimes, about leaving the city. And when we do, the cities we gravitate toward are either much farther North on the East coast, or on the Northwest coast. Places where the livin' is cheap and easy but the weather is inclement more often than not, and you can count the sun shiny days on one hand. He, the Texan, says he'd be fine living somewhere with more rain and snow, but I can't help but wonder if the bleak, bone-chilling eight weeks of total darkness that is February and March in upstate New York (and I'm not talking Poughkeepsie, I'm talking Finger Lakes) would make him go all The Shining on my ass.

I've been using this week as a test: "This rain huh? Wow, sure is cold and dark...Imagine if it were like this for weeks, for months...because that's what it's like in..."

So far G has talked weather relativism. How staying indoors for a few months due to hundred degree temps and humidity (like in Texas) is no different than staying indoors because it's freezing and miserable. And then he runs his thumb along the sharpened tip of the ax he bought because "it was such a weird thing to see at the 99 cent store", and smiles; and wonders aloud if months of forced isolation isn't just what he needs to finally finish his novel.

Posted by Antigeist at October 14, 2005 01:59 PM