Mosquitoes. They’ll get ya.
The damned mosquitoes linger. They retreat to strongholds in Capitol Hill close to the water and to Rock Creek, but they hang around until the middle of November. Joggers in the park still swat haplessly at their legs while they run in their long sleeve University of Virginia t-shirts before work or on cool Saturday mornings.’
The period of decent into the darkest and shortest days of the year still pockmarked by evidences of summer’s unwillingness to disappear. Scratch. Scratch.
Outdoor cafes bring out heat lamps in the cool evenings and in Dupont Circle at Circa and in Adams Morgan at Cashion’s, the early nights under the propane lamps seem purer in the drying air, with the first desiccated leaves falling to the concrete. A process of purification somehow aware of its own inability to achieve sterility. A cleansing of the sweat-infested city comes with the soaking rains of November and the early ice storms in December.
Mosquito bites begin to heal with the arrival of the holiday season. All of a sudden the weathermen are talking about wind-chill factors. When did that happen? And then the doorknobs begin to dish out electric shocks. Sometimes it’s on the same day, these equally portentous indicators of winter, which catches everyone off guard again. Throw in the changing clocks and the family time, and in all it’s a tough time to live in a city of middle grounds. One that never fully inhabits winter, its bars and restaurants opening themselves to the icy winds that eventually find their way down H Street, NE. No preparations are made for their arrival.
The department of public works in Washington owns four snow plows and the school district cancels school for rain. Whenever there are white blotches on the map indicating approaching frontal systems, the mechanisms for the shutting down of various institutions whip into action. A city that runs the bureaucracy of the country closing its shutters for a few drops of ice—or, occasionally, a blue sky day that whistles past the weathermen and releases the snow-day-feverish students into the streets.
Without coats, of course. They don’t need coats, they insist, and really probably don’t. They rush around on the Metro and wear neon sneakers and skinny jeans and celebrate their presence in a city whose urbanity escapes the unwatchful eyes of commuters to Virginia, Maryland, even Pennsylvania, skulking into the city on the Virginia Railway Express, the crowded MARC trains from Baltimore, the Loudoun County Express buses. Commuters comically overdressed in the perspective of Midwestern tourists who wear their hooded sweatshirts and watch the natives walk down the Mall on a gray day in December.
They scratch their heads at the children running around everywhere and the bounty of mittens.
