Living in Arizona, it’s easy to become obsessed with the temperature. I know people who are plunged into deep depression at the sight of a seven day forecast predicting 90-degree highs in March, and even more (like myself) who get stupidly excited about lightning and rain. I think that weather has an unsung ability to bring out the strange in a population – after a particularly long dry spell in Phoenix, you can sometimes walk outside your house and see people all along the block, standing on their porches, staring into the sky.

Traveling in Europe this summer, every place I went was deluged by rain – Montreal, Krakow, Warsaw, London, Dublin, and most recently, New York. It made me superstitiously  suspicious that I was being punished for decamping during Arizona’s hottest months – like if I couldn’t handle all the sun, I wasn’t allowed to see any.

I have a taste for that type of coincidence. The best one (admittedly it’s not weather related, but it still seems cosmically punitive) happened as I was moving out of my apartment in Chicago before driving across the country to Arizona: almost everything in the place was clean & packed & ready to go, and then the night before we left, the bathroom ceiling caved completely in. The sucker peeled open like a banana, spewing wet dirt everywhere, the provenance of which remains unknown. Anyone who’s ever been to the Earth Room will have a sense for how unsettling it is for a city apartment to smell like potting soil – but maybe it’s common between the floors? The world may never know.