There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

Whatever Norwegian first thought of the saying: “There’s no bad weather, only bad clothing,” evidently had never spent a summer in St. Louis.  One could, I suppose, go naked, but even that would be uncomfortable.  Even summer is a misnomer because there are actually five seasons between Spring and Fall in St. Louis.  They are: Tornado, Allergies, Bugs Biting You, Regular Summer, Unbearable Heat, and Other Allergies.  Needless to say, such seasons are not marked on the calendar with the same happy festivals that commemorate solstices and harvests.

But this summer has been different.  As early as June, I began remarking on it to friends.  “Is this what halcyon means?” I asked.  The weather was not too hot or too cold.  A pleasant breeze blew. A friend at a neighborhood café said, “I don’t know.”  “I think it’s halcyon.” I said with certainty. 

Ignoring all the advice I give my students about looking words up before using them, I began to use the word, if only in my thoughts, to describe the whole summer.  That perfect temperature beckoned me and my dog to Forest Park day after day.  That pleasant breeze blew as I watched my fig tree, from a stump of eighteen inches surge past the fence line of our yard.  “By August,” I thought, “it will be over twelve feet high.”  We had some hot days, but they were close enough to the halcyon ones that I forgot them quickly.

And that perfect temperature and perfect breeze followed us across the country.  From a day at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Amusement Park with my in-laws to an afternoon watching the monsoon clouds gather over the Sangre de Cristos in Santa Fe to one last picnic with friends in the neighborhood, all I could think was “These are the halcyon days.”

By the time of our departure to Norway, the phrase had become a habit.  Our last day in the U.S., I finally looked up the word.  “Denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically calm and peaceful,” the Oxford English Dictionary told me.  All summer, Norway had been on the horizon.  All summer, I had seen the weather I called halcyon as a good sign.  Turns out that a word I thought meant auspicious actually means nostalgic.

No matter.  Our last day, we drove through 90-degree (Fahrenheit) temperatures to deliver our cars to my husband’s aunt and uncle in St. Charles.  Missouri.  My thighs were sticking to the car seat.  My aunt drove us back to St. Louis on the return trip.  We got stuck in traffic.  The light glared.  We all sweated.  I asked to listen to a cd my husband made for himself and his friends.  It opened with a cover of “Joy Round My Brain,” which you can listen to here:

It was halcyon.