Imagination is my Air Conditioner
If I start shopping for sweaters, will the weather cool off already?
The thin line between magical thinking and research has been apparent to me for weeks, with my attempts to control the future appearing in my browser as tabs about personal finance. But now I see my desire to stop sweating on the walk to school, and to escape reminders of global warming, in a new flurry of internet interest: fall clothes. I am tired of twice-daily showers. I am desperate for a shiver.
This feeling is right on schedule for the end of a sticky summer. The crisp white T-shirt has yellowed, my tennis shoes are soot-grey with gravel dust, and shorts hang listlessly on the doorknob of my closet. I went to a friend’s birthday party where the TV played You’ve Got Mail on mute, and I promptly hankered for all of Kathleen Kelly’s turtlenecks. I saw a catalogue feature of a photographer’s family in Norway and longed for weather that demands coats. Trench coats. Delusional while the temperature outside hit 85, I nevertheless imagined the insouciance of a chunky sweater. I pictured myself not on the radiant sidewalks of New York, trying to keep shawarma juice contained inside a pita, but perched on a Nordic hillside, contemplating a windswept valley, drinking twig tea. Maybe I am just tired of the thick, fragrant, heavily sensory quality of summer and ready for autumn as one is ready for clean sheets and a crisp new page of the notebook. The relief of the senses is its own pleasure.
When the actual weather won’t oblige by sending real, objective cold, I have learned this week that I can always cool off in my imagination. I’ve been reading Far From the Madding Crowd, a Thomas Hardy novel from 1874 about a woman who inherits a farm. She briefly runs the farm herself while three different suitors circle her like vultures (two of them are semi-benevolent vultures, but still). Much of the story takes place outside because it’s a novel obsessed with its depiction of rural life; it really doesn’t think we will care about this woman if we don’t also get some charming portraits of the sheep shearing, or of the oldest guy in the village telling stories at the pub to the new shepherd. Anyway, the first half of the story takes place when the woman’s farm is pulling in the harvest, and the atmosphere is that of rustic idyll: all fresh air and golden sunlight and cider trickling down the chin of a laborer who has rushed over the field with news of the missus. The season is summer, as it stubbornly remains here, but the air is fresher in Wessex. The sun warms the grain-dusted air and goes down more gently after a day of shearing the sheep than it does in my neighborhood, where it just seems to ripen the garbage.
Meanwhile, nighttime in the novel carries a faint chill. The protagonist Bathsheba (I know! Bathsheba! These Victorians-cum-Modernists!) furtively, without telling anyone, takes her carriage one night to go meet her crush in Bath. (Obviously he is bad news, this crush, but he’s good with a sword, if you know what I mean). As a reader, you can access the damp night air and the chill between the pines that you just know would steal down your neck, too, if you were skulking through the forest without leaving word with Liddy the housekeeper. You can hear the spurt of the matches her bailiff uses to track the carriage path in the dark, believing the horse has been stolen. And when it’s 85% humidity in 2021, Thomas Hardy can keep talking about country life all he wants. I’m here breathing in those great big lungfuls of fictional fresh air and loving every page of it.
All I’m saying is that the landscape and atmospheric descriptions are good enough that I might easily forget the sultry city air outside. It’s easy to think instead that I’m now at the far-too-serious farmer Boldwood’s shoulder, overhearing him bargain desperately on the road with the rake who will surely ruin Bathsheba’s reputation. It’s dark outside, and I find myself breathing shallow; I don’t want to wake the neighbors. Then I realize I mean the neighbors in the novel— the ones who might overhear Boldwood bargaining with Sergeant Troy. The air is clearer in this book than it is in my real life, maybe because the bad guys are so clearly bad guys whom the fictional world will hopefully punish (I haven’t finished the book yet), whereas out here, ambiguities persist and the Sacklers are still filthy rich. I wouldn’t wish another massive thunderstorm on us in New York, not after last week’s abrupt flooding. But for now, in Bathsheba Everdene’s village of Weatherbury, the “infuriated” heavens threaten a rain that’s going to teach us something. The shepherd Gabriel (he’s the good one, obviously) and Bathsheba are working together to save the harvest. Until real relief comes, the pages of an immersive novel are a great way to cool off if you can’t get your window unit to work any harder.
Another way to manufacture a sense of seasonal relief is to watch the shows where people are wearing appropriately bulky, practical clothing for the weather where they are: The Pursuit of Love, which is available on Amazon Prime, welcomes the viewer to the impregnable country pile where two aristocratic teen girls will spend Christmas just after WWI. They are posh and reserved with everyone except each other, and their embarrassed English reticence is the anti-lush of mannerisms. Moreover, the two main characters wear sweaters over their pajamas, so you know it’s not a centrally heated castle. Here again, imaginative cool is available on demand.
There has got to be a better way to long for fall, I think as I click into an Etsy link about autumn fashions. I want crisp air and warm layers and soup. But we are not there yet, not in New York. If they walk into a warm classroom, my 6th grade students insist with reactionary exasperation that their favorite season is winter. If the last few years are any indication, I will only get to gratify my wool socks fantasy as we pass Thanksgiving.
For now, the incremental cooling of the weather is all I can acknowledge and celebrate. For now, I check in with Hardy, turn off my A/C, and open a window. I crack a seltzer and let the mild breeze pour in. If I stay still with a book, it is comfortable— even cool. If I stay calm for a little longer and listen for the drone of blue-bottle flies in the English summer air, the turtlenecks can wait.