I wrote about cooler temperatures on Monday. Here we are on Wednesday and it feels like Fall.

In what still passes for normal to my mind, the weather would stay like this for a couple of weeks, then the temperature would spike up for a week or less in October, and then fall back to autumnal levels. But that doesn’t seem to be how it works in our new climate regime. Now it seems like Summer extends into at least October and then Winter arrives with a damp and chilly thud. The Fall it seems, is relegated to a couple of hours in November.

I say “would” and “seems” because I’m not really sure. I guess I could head over to Dark Sky and use their “Time Machine” to look at the past few years. Or I could Google around and find weather trends.

But I won’t.

If I did, I’d probably forget what I learned after a while anyway. I’d revert to how I feel things should be. I’d hang on to the memory of the Christmas when I got my first new bike, an Apollo three-speed. It was a memorable event because I was able to ride my new bike on Christmas Day! With just a corduroy jacket and no hat! It was an unseasonably warm Christmas for what must have been 1970 or ’71.

Weather is the setting for our memories. Like aromas and music, weather is stored in our pasts, indexed to emotional experiences.

The little bit of news I let in right now is the PBS Newshour, and they’ve been covering the fires out west. But the cover the fires. Not America’s biggest concern, the cost. Not the implications on the United States’ favorite hobby, the politics. They cover the fires and their impact on human beings.

About two minutes of the PBS coverage yesterday was Trump saying something stupid about the fires and climate change. Something that was worth at 20 or 30 minutes on CNN or MSNBC. Maybe even a Special Hour! by one of their attention-seeking Primetime Pundits.

But like they’ve been doing with the pandemic, PBS shows you the facts on the ground. I’ve been watching their coverage these past months and wondering about the memories that are being indexed, first of the pandemic and now of the fires. Will they be about the terrible thing Trump or one of his thralls said the day they lost their home or their family member?

I don’t think so.

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