Trop Chaud

For those not familiar with Celsius, this is equivalent to 82 Farenheit in Montreal and 90 Farenheit in South Florida. 

We arrived in Montréal in full summer, but the last thing I expected was to struggle with the heat. We did, after all, come from South Florida, where the winter season is basically summer, and summer is akin to being cremated.

Yet we were taken aback by just how hot the Montréal summer was. One July day, after a particularly hot and sweaty bike ride home from camp, my daughter said, “Mommy, we tried to escape and it didn’t work.” I asked her what she meant. She replied, “We tried to escape the heat in Florida but it’s still too hot in Canada.” I suggested that perhaps we should spend next summer in Greenland. “Or Antarctica,” she said.

The heat was undoubtedly worse in Florida, but there we moved from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned store (sometimes places were so air conditioned that you had to put a sweater on when going inside). Surely we feel the heat more in Montréal, due to the fact that we walk and bike everywhere, and also far fewer places have air conditioning at all (though thank God our apartment has central A/C). The bike rides home from camp in the summer were particularly brutal, going uphill in the late afternoon heat.

The heat did ease off a bit in early September, but it has stayed much hotter much later in the month than I expected – the so called “Indian Summer” (and also, climate change is real). I keep leaving the house with a sweater, expecting I might get cold, but instead I find myself sweating in pants and wishing I had worn shorts.

I do love the fall weather though. In Florida, they had novelty license plates which showed the black silhouette of a surfer against and orange and yellow sunset, with the line “ENDLESS SUMMER.” If I could have my way, it would be “ENDLESS FALL.”