For the past several days—until today, alas—we’ve been having a spell of entirely uncharacteristic weather in the Washington, D.C. area. The days have been in the 70s and the nights, pure bliss: in the high 60s, a temperature for open windows and a thick breeze that feels like it’s straight from the Atlantic, and I…

The sun was high in the sky. Midday, late July. The light was washed out. The black of the asphalt was washed out, not even gray anymore, not even a color. Albuquerque is divided between the people who, at midday, go elsewhere and the people who don’t go elsewhere. As I said it was midday,…

The summer after my freshman year in college, I made the mistake of signing a lease without noticing that the place had no air conditioning. The lease was for a bedroom in an informal boardinghouse set up by the widowed owner of a large, falling-apart, turn-of-the-century house in Uptown New Orleans. (But of course!, you ’re thinking, she is making this up for literary effect!)