Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.

I was young, so it feels like something I read in a book sometimes. I remember how chilly it could get at night in the summer, which doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore.

That’s actually the thing that seems to keep popping back up in my mind - that like, it was really chilly in the mornings in summer even, and it would warm up, and it seems to just kind of… stay warm all the time.

I dunno. The seasons were more distinct, there were bigger temperature swings on individual days, and like… weather was more predictable on a seasonal basis, if not on a daily basis.

Like… the kind of seasons you read about in Olde Tyme Books? They… were real things. We didn’t always have snow on Winter Break, but we had a pretty predictable number of snow days?

And it almost feels silly to talk about it. “What were normal seasons like, Uncle Spider?”

But yeah.

Watch seasonal-based movies made before about 1975 -- ones set around Easter, or Halloween, or New Year’s -- and pay attention to what people are wearing. Late October? It got cold when the sun went down, like ‘put on a jacket’ cold and I’m not talking northern US, I’m talking Georgia.

Today (Aug 18) is only a week before the start of most public schools in the US. A week from now? Back then, it’d already be chilly in the morning, enough to need a windbreaker on the way to school. By midday it would’ve warmed up, but even in Georgia the mornings had a nip to them by end of August, start of September.

And in northern Virginia, not sure about now, but the schools used to plan for ten snow days a year. I recall one year we had eleven days off thanks to a foot or so of fresh snow every two or three days. Even in years we didn’t use all the snow days, there were still frequent late openings and early closings. It wasn’t all that uncommon for summer vacation to start a week later, because those days had to be made up, somewhere.

Locally, this summer has (despite the terrible heat elsewhere in the US) been a strange bit of callback to my childhood. Excepting two nights all summer, every night it’s dropped to 72F at the highest, but most often in the 60s -- with the caveat that it sometimes took half the night to get there. It’s not a sharp drop like I remember, as a child. But at least it has been cool enough to leave the windows open and a fan on -- and that’s the kind of summer I grew up with, in Alabama and Georgia (regions significantly warmer, otherwise, than the mid-atlantic where I live now).

That sharp drop was the reason my dad installed a whole-house fan every place we lived: because the evening air would legitimately drop a good 5-10 degrees as the sun set. Enough to open the windows, run the fan, and the whole house would cool right down by dinnertime.

Now? If we go by last summer, even having a house set up perfectly (central open staircase) for a whole-house fan, what’s the point if the temperature stays just as high after the sun goes down, as it was before?

I recently read a poem about climate change making the seasons less familiar in a poetry collection published in 1978.

I was like, excuse me? It was noticeable already? Obviously I know it's changed in my lifetime, but...