Ciao amici— not dead, just busy with several other projects, two trips to the US, two weddings (one of which I officiated!), and the number one focus of this summer: staying cool! In more ways than one, of course.
Hope you enjoy it! As ever, feel free to drop me a line anytime.
x ash
I do not handle the heat particularly well.
One of my earliest memories is from a water park in Japan, where a long afternoon in the blazing sun caught me and my mother by surprise. I remember standing rigid, trembling in the sunlight and unable to move or speak for a few moments before throwing up and passing out. In later childhood, I remember long summers spent at my grandparents’ house in Florida, sitting motionless watching Nick at Nite in the spare guest room with the fan creaking overhead to provide the smallest relief, giant flying ants buzzing around in the humid air. (Old school Floridians never use air conditioning for anything but to ‘take the edge off’). We’d take breaks by going into the ocean or to the movies or the mall, bathed in icy blasts of freshness that, ironically, often left a person needing a sweater.
Still, it wasn’t until I spent a month in Kenya in the summer between my junior and senior year of college that I learned the meaning of real heat. Inescapable heat. Heat so intense it slammed me with migraines even my industrial-strength prescription medication couldn’t touch until finally, after four days of misery, I slowly acclimated to the new climate.
For this reason, I wasn’t concerned when our neighbors and friends in Rome warned us that Turin would be cold, that the climate up here wasn’t as good as in the central or south of Italy. I could deal with the colder winters, I reasoned, in exchange for cooler summers. And it’s true– Turin is cooler, in general, than Rome.
But I’ll be honest with you– 95 degrees isn’t all that much better than 100 when you get right down to it. With the heatwaves that have been scorching Europe (though the science tells us that these, perhaps, are less ‘heatwaves,’ which imply a deviation from the normal, than simply a new normal) we’ve been struck by temperatures in the 85-95 degree range since May, with a few dips and reprieves here and there.
All, I should probably remind my American listeners, without air conditioning. No central air at home. Rare instances in shops or restaurants.
Being forced (by my own choices) to live in these conditions has been a humbling experience. My life has slowed down considerably; I have less patience than usual; I am experiencing discomfort on a far more regular basis than almost ever before. I began to think of my friends back in the states with envy– even my father’s house, which is typically managed ‘old school Floridian’ style, I started to recall as a dreamy, icy igloo providing safety and respite from the relentless sun.
By mid-July, I had more or less decided that all of human civilization, from the first spark of intentional fire to the erection of stone cathedrals to nuclear fission was mostly in service of inventing air conditioners.
When my cousins Maurizio and Franca invited Adam and I to stay in their rental apartment in Cinque Terre, we leapt at the chance and went the very next week. The overwhelming joy I felt in the moment I first submerged into the cold, overly salty water of the sea– the first time I’d been truly cool in weeks– was not dissimilar from how I felt when Adam got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I’m not exaggerating.
Just a few days after our return, our friend Sebastiano invited us to go to the mountains to stay in his family home in Cogne. A quick check of the weather apps confirmed– a crisp 75-85 degree range, unusually hot for that area, but still cool compared to the 85-95 we were still experiencing in Turin. We went, and reveled in the thin, cold air coming off of the Gran Paradiso glacier in waves strong enough to fly a kite in it.
Some would say (and I wouldn’t disagree), that we are incredibly fortunate, if not actively spoiled. People spend thousands of dollars and all of their limited vacation days to have those same experiences that we were generously offered as a matter of course. What I think some of those individuals are missing, however, is that these kinds of trips are not just a matter of holiday fun: for those of us living with the reality of the temperature, they’re also a matter of survival.
How frustrating, I thought, that life could be dictated by something so primitive as heat. I realized that as an American, I had grown used to thinking of environment as something to be controlled and subjected to my own whims. How much better it was, I thought, to choose to go to the seaside simply because you want to, not because you have to. Why should my daily or weekly routine change for something as prosaic as a seasonal shift?
And then I jumped into the Ligurian sea. And then I tasted gelato at 4 PM on the hottest day of the year. And then I discovered how much more productive my writing is in the very early morning (it’s so pleasant to sit on our balcony before it gets direct sunlight). And only then did I truly, truly appreciate what it means to have a long, shady, tree-lined riverwalk.
Air conditioning makes life more convenient, and convenience is less a luxury than a necessity for extremely busy American lives. But what really underlies the air conditioning question, I think, is not convenience, but control. American culture prides itself on prioritizing independence, and independence requires having control– over yourself and your environment.
In a certain sense, it is impossible to be independent here. You cannot sit in a breezy, shady outdoor cafe, enjoying your cappuccino, without acknowledging the shared sense of relief among everyone around you that a hundred years ago, someone planted these trees. You begin to mind the crowds at the beach less, because you know that everyone is in the same boat. And you realize that the strict aperitivo hour is less about social convention than the fact that a sparkling, lightly alcoholic beverage is exactly what one needs at the apex of the sun’s fury.
You simply cannot experience quite the same level of joy in relief if it isn’t born out of a challenging context and you don’t find yourself in those contexts without relinquishing control.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned is that there are things in life we cannot control, and rather than wasting time trying to change those things, it’s better to simply do what we can to find contentment within the limitations and constraints we face. This is stoicism at its core, a philosophy I’ve studied and tried to live by since my early twenties. It is egnerally applied to the more internal parts of life– relationships, personal growth, etc.
And yet I’ve never experienced it more viscerally than through surviving the heat during this first summer in Turin. All I can say is, it’s one thing to know something academically, and it’s another to feel it viscerally.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s about time for my summer afternoon nap.
Hot Hot Heat