The Eighties Arrive Again

No, not the era of Top Gun and Billy Idol. I’m talking about temperatures in our part of Texas. Yesterday in Austin we saw just about the last of our highs in the 70s. (Come to think of it, there were a lot of those kinds of highs in the Seventies. Ba-dum-bump. Thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

April left us with too little rain, but it hasn't kept the lawns and the Indian Paintbrush wildflowers, from growing in climbing temperatures at a healthy clip. We’re all comparing our cutting down here — “I only had to cut the lawn twice in the last three weeks.” But air from over Mexico, and that from the Gulf next to it, are about to overpower any cool fronts that jet through. Our weather service “forecast discussion” now warns of weeks where “Rain chances decrease and hot dry weather will result as a dominating ridge build into the southern plains.”

It's as plain as the blooming lawns that summer sets in by early May, as usual, and it won’t depart until October. Big glasses of iced tea, and livin’ in the AC, help us transplanted Yankees stay cool. Lessons I learned in the Eighties, when I spent my first summers here, astounded by the powerful heat. Today I got in my first long ride since the HCRA, and the last of my pedaling through cool air for the season, down Parmer Lane's broad shoulders and up through Breakaway Park, a "fly-in community" where you can taxi your private plane out of the garage and right onto the Breakaway airstrip.