Summertime...And the Livin' Is Easy

It's summertime. In South Florida, that would seem to be anytime, but it's not. There's a different feeling in the air--more tropical. It's the same kind of air mass that breeds hurricanes, unfortunately, but it is mostly just very humid, usually sunny, tropical air, coming up often from the south.

It begins to settle over us about the first of June and lasts well into October, with showers and thunderstorms people can set their watches by, beginning about 3:00 p.m., usually firing up from the west, and ending by 3:30. The rain soaks into the sandy soil like a sponge, and things dry off quickly as the sunshines returns.

Visitors are often surprised to find how local and defined these downpours can be, literally raining hard on one side of a street and remaining dry and sunny on the other. Down here, one can actually see a curtain of a rain coming down the block, then get soaked a few minutes later as it reaches the observer.

As for discomfort in the South Florida heat, the objection one hears "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," is true. Having lived here since 1976, I am still amazed at how quickly the beads of sweat form when I'm outside doing the least little bit of work or activity. Even my morning walk of a few blocks leaves me soaked by the time I return home, and I have to change clothes.

But what can one expect, living on the tip of a peninsula that juts out six hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean? We're going to get some rain, to put it mildly. The fact that we haven't had enough of it this whole year has left us in a severe drought that threatens our drinking supply and shuts down our lawn watering despite the fact that we're two weeks into our "rainy season," but I have no doubt that the wetness will return as we cycle through.

Despite the extremes of humidity and drought, heat and hurricanes, lightning (Florida is the lightning capital of the world most years) and other phenomena, however, I think our climate to be much easier to live in than many other parts of the country. I remember Indiana heat waves that had us melting and Chicago and New York heat waves that actually killed many of those unfortunate enough not to have air conditioning. And every summer, as high pressure domes of heat park over the midwest and cities from Dallas to Clevelend just broil in 100-plus degrees that lasts for days or weeks with no relief, I thank my lucky stars I'm in the mid-eighties and lower nineties here in South Florida in the summertime.