Rain brings its own problems. Scratched windows and bent wipers make driving a blur. The road is always doubled, wet above and wet reflection below. Streetlights and tail-lights smear. Sudden dark figures menacing their vulnerability. I drive on faith. I drive with a hunch back and squinted eyes, looking for an angle of sure vision, past the high whine wiper blades. It’s always dark and it’s always wet. I’m always in leather shoes and a wool coat, everything is always being ruined, I always wear long jeans, they’re always soaked. I don’t understand why I can’t dress for the weather. I just can’t believe in inevitability.

I almost went mad this summer in Vancouver because it was sunny for two months straight. Every day I would wake up to the sun and every day I would drive to work in the bright, bright hot sun and every day I would rage at the traffic and the heat and the glare.

Calgary is much colder when it’s cold and much hotter when it’s hot and much windier and horrible in so many ways, but at least it’s unpredictable. In Calgary a hot summer is a two-week stretch, then a snowstorm. A bad winter is ten days of snow then five days of spring. I’m beginning to understand how much I’ve internalized these cycles of change. I need days that start off warm enough for t-shirts and end at 20 below. I need to see the change in the sky and smell it on the air and feel the pressure of the weather in my head.

Here the sky and the ocean are the same, we’re sandwiched, we’re sponged, the city is a lung, we’re all just breathing.

I’m appalled at how much I think about the weather.