Summer in the City

It’s summer in boston, all but officially, now. After a sopping May and breezily cool early June, the sun is finally exerting itself, alternating shiny-hot days with muggy-hot preambles to isolated T-storms; scattered T-storms; liberal sprinklings of T-storms.

It’s summer, and schools are out so kids have more time to help out on the farm during these peak growing months. Harvard Square has shifted its focus from late-night hungry undergrads to university-memorabilia-hungry summer school students and khakier-than-ever throngs of tourists eager to swallow specious legends about large campus buildings and thoroughly defiled statues.

The T, in its best days convenient but vaguely sketchy, has begun its transformation to tremoric miasma. Sweat makes its triumphant return. The view off the Longfellow Bridge tempts the unthinkable idea: maybe it would be cooler if I jumped in the Charles.

The weather and I are still in a sort of honeymoon period: brief, scattered showers come along break the humidity every few days, and my Danish skin has yet to feel the full effects of the sun’s blistering wrath. And soon, hopefully, we will know enough about the sun to tame it and bend it to our will. It’ll be nice if science can trump weather in this case, because, as I learned in my meterology class, science says that raindrop formation is exceedingly unlikely. Ella and my office-mate Mary Kate would tend to disagree with science in this case; they’ve both missed baseball games when astronomically small odds collided to form raindrops right over Fenway Park.