Fall begins here in the Northern Hemisphere on September 23rd. When you think of fall, you think of cool winds coming from the north, leaves falling off trees, Halloween and maybe Thanksgiving, jackets, and not having to run the AC all damn day. At least, that’s the way television and such have portrayed it for years, and in some parts of the United States this actually seems pretty valid.
Not here in Memphis. Instead, this past week has been nearly 100 degree Fahrenheit high temperatures almost constantly, after a Summer which has very consistently been 80+ since, oh, May. Yep, May to September, it’s constantly humid and temperatures are always at or above 90, save for the night when you may get lucky and it dips below 75… still with heavy humidity.
This would normally be just where I’d say “Summer sucks in the south” and move on, but it gets worse. “Winter” here isn’t any better, but behaves completely differently — it either wants to be about or below freezing, or randomly jumps to 50 or 60, only dive back down the next day. You can never adapt – when it’s cold, it’s bitterly cold, but when it decides to warm up on a random day in the middle of January, it’s so warm you feel hot since just yesterday you were getting used to the moderately low temps. This usually lasts from November (triggered by a random storm which means “no more hot days” until, well, April, when it finally begins to warm up. It’s so wild we’ve actually had snow storms in April recently. For contrast, we almost never get snow until at least January — anything in November or December is virtually unheard of except in rare cases, like a Christmas Eve freeze over in 2004.
So, what of Spring and Fall? Those are barely one month long each, if you’re lucky, and even then they aren’t the “mid 70’s all week” comfortable weather like many think of when they think of those seasons — instead they are the “bipolar” phase of Memphis weather, where the temperatures are either randomly hot, randomly cold, or occasionally alright. For perspective, November 2018 had maximum highs in the low 70’s to lows in the 20’s. For summer to have a range between 75 and 100, that just seems like quite the shift, more broad than it should be.
I’ll actually admit the past Spring was somewhat peasant, but this was a rare event which, honestly, given how warm the last winter was I’m pretty sure was triggered by climate change more than anything else. It was still chaotic but it was a warmer chaotic period, save for some really extreme dives and varied temps, as that’s what would happen when more energy is put into a dynamic system — more wild changes will occur.
My point is, it’s a mess. It’s never really consistent, save for humidity and Summer heat. Winter is a real crap shoot day by day on if you’re going to freeze or have a slightly less cold day. Spring and Fall, which should be gradual shifts periods from cold to warm, and warm to cold, instead just seem to be a mix of cold Winter days and hot Summer days, with a few “decent” days mixed in.
You can’t win, and rarely is stepping outside a comfortable experience — it’s always too hot or too cold to be worth it, especially for someone like me. It’s just too dynamic, never settling down to a point where you can just take it for what it is, unlike so many other places where there’s at least a consistency to the temperatures — even if they are “always hot” or “always cold” at least they are always something. Not here in Memphis….