It’s been amazingly temperate for at least the past week, if not the entire two weeks since summer began. There have been a few days of mid-80s temps with some high humidity, but those days have usually been followed in quick succession by days in the 70s with virtually mild humidity or (as was the case yesterday) overcast skies and bursts of rain. If this is Michigan summer, I like it. I have a feeling this is the lull before the real scorch-fest starts, though. I’m bracing myself, but that’s fairly futile. In the battle between my Anglo-Saxon/Swedish and Mexican genetic makeup, clearly the north has the upper hand in weather preference. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in Mexico City or Ciudad Juárez during the summer months, let alone Tucson or El Paso (or Norman, for that matter, which was one of my early choices under consideration for library school). Nevertheless, since there are a lot of other great qualities about the Southwest (including, among other things, the incomparable, bewitching light during the end of the afternoon and dusk in Santa Fe, which you can instantly remember even by looking at a couple of not-so-great photographs in the newspaper, as I did yesterday), I may as well start getting used to the idea of warmer weather.