Summer Ends (Did You Even Notice?)

Remember this? No, you do not remember this.

Today is the first day of autumn, and it’s a nice one. This week’s weather is going to be more summer-like than much of summer itself. On our warmest day, July 22, we hit 88 degrees. But daytime highs in the 80s were rare. Summer began on June 21 and from that date through September 22 we reached 80 degrees only 17 times and we never had more than 3 consecutive days with highs in the 80s. We had 61 days in the 70s, 11 days in the 60s, and 4 days in the 50s. Our lowest summertime high was 46 degrees on September 12. This summer our chances of hitting 80 were only slightly greater than our chances of being stuck below 70. Other stats I wish I had kept? How many times did we reach 70 degrees for only a few minutes late in the afternoon before we fell back into the 60s? How many times was the high temperature recorded just after midnight, the residual warmth of the previous day? Having 61 “70-degree” days sounds great, but the reality was far less satisfying than the raw numbers suggest.

From June 21 through September 22, I rode 2,298 miles. Summer wasn’t a complete loss by any means, but for more than a few of those miles I was wrapped up in warmers and tights. I’m putting Global Warming on notice: make a more sincere effort to improve things around here by 2019. That’s when my youngest child will graduate from high school and I will consider myself free to relocate. I will be 54 years old and maybe my priorities will be a little different. But I can’t imagine that I won’t still be a cyclist, and I can’t imagine that I won’t still want to live in perpetual summer.