The weather has become almost shamefully glorious.

After weeks and weeks of heat, highs near a hundred, long past what was normal (claimed the weather gurus–couldn’t prove it by us)it’s as if Nature suddenly got ahold of a calender and said “What? November? Shit! Sorry ’bout that…” and more or less overnight, the temperature plummeted into the sixties and seventies. You can open the windows now. You go out onto the patio in the morning to water the plants, and instead of the room-temperature concrete of last week, or the toasty concrete of last month, your feet report that this sucker is cold! You smell the air and you can concieve of the possibility of frost–not now, certainly, but maybe in a few months. The air a few weeks ago was not frost-air. It and frost could not coexist.

I found myself digging for jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and then the reality of what I was doing struck me, and I leapt to my feet and shouted “Eureka!” and dove into the pile of boxes that have been lurking in the corner of the bedroom for several months now, which contained my Minnesotawear. We arrived in July, and you can’t unpack long sleeved shirts in July in Arizona, so they had been sitting patiently in boxes, awaiting a break in temperature. And, having lived in Minnesota for ten years, my wardrobe is almost entirely geared towards cool weather, so my heretofore half-empty closet is suddenly filled, and my tank-tops-and-t-shirts wardrobe has suddenly been bolstered with the clothes I actually LIKE, which are mostly weird batiks and various things meant to be worn in layers. And life is good again. And I am still not fashionable, but at least I like the colors.

In an unrelated note, I have also learned that people who have not lived in the Midwest do not seem to have heard of that apotheosis of Midwest cuisine–the Deep-Fried Cheese Curd. Tell me it ain’t so!

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