Thirty Five

Thirty-five degrees Celsius. I used to not know what that felt like. Or at least, I wasn’t familiar enough with the gradations of that temperate scale to know that 35 degrees is misery. 

The summer before I moved to Italy, as I counted down my final days in Boston, a friend suggested I switch my weather app into Celsius to start preparing my mind for the change. I took his advice, but the numbers felt like abstractions at best. Today is twenty-something degrees? Sure, if you say so.

It is no longer an abstraction.

Milan has been about 35 degrees virtually every day since June. I don’t need to do the conversion to Fahrenheit to know that 35 degrees is impossible.

Thirty-five degrees is sweating, constantly. Thirty-five degrees is avoiding nearly every unnecessary journey outside. Thirty-five degrees is keeping the shutters drawn and my apartment dark all day. Thirty-five degrees is blasting my improperly-installed AC unit for hours on end, only to drop the indoor temperature to a frisky 30.4. Thirty-five degrees is telling my landlord, over and over again, that I can’t live like this, only to get a shrug. Thirty-five degrees is wanting to scream.

It’s not like I’ve never dealt with heat before. I lived through more than one of Boston’s hottest-ever summers on record. When the exceptionally hot days arrive, you sweat and bitch and complain and then, at some point, the heat wanes, you get a nice little break: A livable climate, as a treat. Then it starts all over again.

The special torture of this Milan summer is the constancy of it, the waking up every day and knowing it won’t be any different, we won’t get any break. Maybe we get 32 degrees instead of 36, but the reality is the same. When I phone my parents and they complain about a rainy day that suspends plans for the beach, I think to myself, “My god, I would kill for some rain.”

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes, saying, “Oh, Mike. You get to stay inside all day and click-clack on the laptop keys for a living. You go on vacations. So many people have it worse.” Yes, exactly. That’s the point. If it’s unbearable even for me, with all of these privileges, it is unbearable for us all.

Or maybe you’re saying, “Boo-hoo, just leave the city for August like the rest of the Italians.” August? Girl, it’s been like this since June. Am I supposed to flee my city for three full months of the year?

Or you might be pulling out the classic, “Milan summers have always been like this.” Wrong. In 2008, Milan summer saw an average of six hours a day above 30 degrees. By 2026, it doubled to 12 hours a day.

And please, for the love of god, we need to stop calling this a heat “wave.” Waves ebb. I don’t know what cute metaphor you apply to an entire summer of temperatures this high, but it surely is not a “wave.” It is climate change. It is our new normal. (Actually, it’s worse than that: This will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives; it will only keep getting hotter until we stop burning fossil fuels).

Sustained heat like this is not simply unpleasant. It constricts the very fabric of daily life. It sucks away the desire to do just about anything that requires leaving the house. Until it gets so bad that you convince yourself to schlep out to the nearest body of water and dunk yourself under. But sometimes, even then, you are thwarted: You step into the lake on the city’s outskirts only to find it is nearly as warm as the air.

A couple weeks ago, I made an unsettling discovery in my apartment. I have a portable AC unit, the freestanding kind you can wheel around. Rather than vent out a window, the tube is attached, permanently, to my wall. I assumed that, from there, a pipe brought the air up and out through the roof, as there is no hole on the facade of the building. This was all installed before I got here, and I assumed it was fine.

Not so.

My apartment also has those aforementioned shutters, which slide out from the exterior wall kind of like pocket doors. One morning, I angled my phone camera into that thin space where the shutters live, hoping to get a look at this mysterious venting pipe up to the roof. I was shocked to find there was none: The AC tube simply breaks through the brick and then stops, dumping all the hot hair inside the exterior wall, where it then, slowly, seeps out past the shutters.

Come to think of it, maybe this is our metaphor. We, as a society, continue to shuffle around the air in a vain effort to keep ourselves more comfortable. We ignore the emergency at hand, reach for simple pleasures, as the heat lingers right there on the other side.

Two nights before this post hit your inbox, a rainstorm blew through Milan. I yanked open my windows, slid back the shutters, and welcomed the cooling air into my apartment.

I lay in my bed for hours as the thunder and lightning brought with it some of the freshest air I’d felt in weeks. The next morning, I woke up to the weather I’d been dreaming of all summer: A brisk 21C, cool enough to drop the indoor temperature of my living room by several notches.

I felt reborn. I put on a nice polo and practically skipped down the stairs to go for a morning walk to the coffee shop. (A polo?! With no one to impress?? Who is she!!). I memorialized the moment with a selfie in the lobby of my building, to which my boyfriend replied, “You’re radiant 🤩.”

He was right. Even if the temperature would still rise over 30C that afternoon, even the treat of a couple cool morning hours felt like the sweetest gift of the whole summer.

This week, I leave you with some pretty flowers from the side of the trail.