Is there no middle ground?

For the last week or so, it's been so hot that we've been forced to live in our basement. We're talking +32 celsius, with crazy humidity and smoggy can't-breathe-or-sleep conditions. Every day it threatened to rain, and at around 4 p.m. five drops would fall from the sky, or just enough to make everything that much more humid but not enough to water the garden adequately. Well, today it finally rained.

The rain today seems as though it came from somewhere like Thailand or the Amazon, the drops are falling straight down and splashing back up to our knees, and our hillside dirt road should be completely washed away by the end of the day. My lettuce is totally flattened, and it pummelled the petals right off of my poppies (say that three times fast). The irises look like wet dogs. Happily, none of the other plants seem to be destroyed, but I do worry about my fragile little veggie seedlings, many of which are making no progress at all as it is.

Where I live, the climate is the most extremely variable climate I have ever seen. Sure there are colder places. Sure there are hotter places. Sure there are places that get more rain and places that get no rain at all. But I've never before seen one place where these things are expected, where the temperatures vary from -35 and dry as a bone to +35 and so humid you can drink the air. That's a 70 degree temperature variation. Needless to say, we need a lot of clothes living here, and a lot of different shoes. I can always find a silver lining.

In the winter we so easily forget exactly what it feels like to be so hot that you can't touch your own skin, that you can't go upstairs to your own bedroom without getting light-headed. In the summer, I hardly remember those cold drafts coming in the windows and having to breathe shallow so my lungs don't freeze. Give praise to our collective bad memory, because otherwise we'd all be living elsewhere.

There's a feeling that you get, however, when the extremes have moved into the fresh past, and you think "man, we made it through another one." There's a definite batten-down-the-hatches resilience that comes from dealing with this kind of weather. It's a lot of work to stay on top of - especially for the owner of an older home that leaks rain in the summer and is drafty in the winter, who heats with a woodstove and mows the lawn with a push-mower - but man, do we feel tough.

Today, however, I am wishing for moderation, some kind of middle ground where we could maybe have a nice steady rain all night long, then clear sunny skies in the daytime. Boy would my plants love that. Instead, we've had to put towels in front of the basement door for the leaks, the de-humidifier is cranked on high down there, and all of our gutters are overflowing. And it's still going up to +29. Ugh.