It's a Dry Heat. Really.
No Matter What Anticipatory Dread Tries To Tell You
We are early risers in this house. My better half leads the charge on that front, usually up no later than 4:45am daily, with work calls starting shortly after. The dogs always get up with him to have their “coffee” (aka morning treats), then come back into bed with me for another hour or so, because 4:45am is obscene but 5:45-6:00am? Far more reasonable.
Today, we were all up at 4:45am, and as it’s mid-June, the first signs of twilight started to appear minutes later. At first, it was just a thin strip of ember peeking from east over the horizon line, like the lowest setting on the dimmer switch. Within ten minutes, the sky was brushed in swatches of rust and pink, palm trees appearing like black construction paper cut outs against it, the Vegas strip sparkling in the distance from the North.
Some early birds get the worm. And some get the most stunning sky.
This will be my second summer in the desert. Last June, I didn’t know what to expect or what was coming. Not with the skies, but with the heat. I’d heard the warnings. Vegas summers are brutal. You don’t know what 115 feels like until you’ve lived it. Good time to plan a vacation to… anywhere else. My past fifteen years had been spent in Oregon, where many people still didn’t even have air conditioning. Prior to that, I’d lived but long forgotten the wet blanket of humidity from my tenures in the New York City area, Washington DC (by far the worst of bunch - a true swamp), and my Michigan childhood. Also, keep in mind I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers to sleep with the thermostat set at 66 degrees. So if my math was mathing, 100, 105, 110+ was nearly twice that, and I had no idea what I was in for.
I also didn’t really know what “dry heat” meant, but I clung on to that phrase like it was my only lifeline through my first desert summer. And yes, two months (or more) of 100+ days was hot AF… but turned out dry heat WAS different. IS different. And for me, way, way, way easier – and remarkably more pleasant – that the humid hells I’d endured in the past. So I did not flee for cooler lands, but instead adjusted, moving our dog walks to dawn, limiting my outdoor activities and errands, particularly between 11:00am and 3:00pm. Outside of that, not only was it not nearly as horrific or hard as I imagined it to be, it was actually…kind of lovely, particularly in the evenings when the sun starts to tuck in for the night. And the absence of any humidity brings for a certain kind of weightlessness and freedom. The heat here is honest. It tells you what it is and doesn’t hide anything in the air.
I think about how much of that bracing I did last summer, not just with my body but also in my head. The way I’d catch myself holding my breath every time I left the house, got in the car, parked and walked to the front door of my yoga studio, Trader Joe’s, the post office, my favorite local thrift store. How religious I was about using my sunshield. How I packed extra water bottles for even a five-minute errand like I was prepping for the apocalypse (because two 16 ounce Fijis will get you through at least seven minutes of survival).
But none of that came as a response to the actual heat. It came from the idea of the heat, the version I’d built out of other people’s warnings and my own worst-case imagination, months before the thermometer ever had a chance to prove me right or wrong. That’s the cruelest part of anticipatory dread: it charges you in advance for a bill that may never come due. And sometimes the thing you feared IS worse than you thought. But sometimes, it’s nothing at all. Either way, you already paid for it once, in the waiting. And that, my friends, is exhausting and something I actively work on no longer putting my time or attention towards.
In the meantime, who would have believed I’d become the kind of person to say things like, “Wow, it’s only going to be in the 90s today.! Though actually, today’s high is going to be 107, but trust me, it’s truly nowhere near as bad as it might sound.
xo,
SG
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