Having grown up in the foothills of California’s Gold Country, where the summers are hot, I find myself ill-suited to living near the coast, where the weather is noticeably cooler on almost any given day. This places me somewhat at odds with my neighbors, most of who are acclimated to the cooler conditions that prevail here. Just this afternoon, I chatted with a neighbor who shared with me that she found the pleasant 74 degree temperature unpleasantly warm while, to my taste, things were finally coming around to temperatures I consider tolerable.
And this evening, as I was thinking I could be happy here if this evening’s pleasant 75 degrees were a more common occurrence, another neighbor opined, along with his evening greeting, about hoping “this crazy hot April weather isn’t going to be the new normal.”
The cognitive dissonance of finding that my neighbors suffer when temperatures begin to approach my comfort zone makes me feel like a Rhodes Scholar at a trump rally. Feeling like a crawdad at a crap game was not a sensation I often encounter, and one I was ill-equipped to deal with at first. Eventually, however, my dismay turned into acceptance, and finally to resignation, but I will never be able to embrace coastal temps the way my wife, who was raised in San Rafael, has done.
On our first trip to Hawaii, as we stepped off the plane and into the warm embrace of the low 80s, I exclaimed “I could live here,” to which Michelle responded, “Not me!”
I admit to considerable envy of our friends Ziggy and Diane, who have arranged their lives such that they are able to enjoy perpetually warm weather as they traverse the hemispheres twice annually in order to experience not one, but two springs and summers each revolution of the sun. It was a dream of mine as a young man to live in the tropics, where the chill of frost would be the stuff of memory and my winter clothes would become artifacts left over from a former life.
But alas, owing to a combination of lack of vision, planning and execution, my redoubt from colder climes got me no further than Sonoma County, a place where the pipes seldom freeze but the heat rarely penetrates deeply enough to warm the chill in my bones.
This evening I will not complain, however. The temperature couldn’t be more to my liking for this early in the season. So, with the tinge of guilt that naturally accompanies the enjoyment of something not everyone is happy about, and without extensive reflection concerning the implications for global warming contained therein, I can say with conviction/feeling that the weather is lovely this evening.
Tim Konrad
Petaluma, CA
April 22, 2019
sonora2sonoma 
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