Virtually Home

When I finally experienced real winter, the upper-Midwestern winter that I dreaded, it made me depressed. Every aspect of my Minnesota life was built around avoiding and accommodating the awful cold. Imagine my joy at leaving Minnesota at the end of August, before the cold could set in. We spent September in Nebraska and Oklahoma, enjoying the end of the summer. We flew to Australia and landed in the springtime. People said summer would be brutal here, but I'm not sure why. We have one wall-mounted air conditioner in our house. Most days, we don't run it. Instead, we open the windows. On hot days, we go to the beach. The wind kicks up every afternoon around 2 or 3 p.m., like clockwork, and cools the place down. It's never very humid, which means the temperature drops off precipitously around sunset. I will grant that the sun can be brutal, in the middle of the day, but in general the climate here has been lovely so far. Today is March 1, which is accounted the first d...

When we moved, I expected the distance to be the hardest thing. Not being able to get home easily or often. Losing touch with friends. I have moved often enough, and experienced enough big life changes, to know that people gradually grow apart when they don't see each other regularly. Even with effort to arrange visits, deep relationships turn into periodic shallow updates. There are no new memories, only a growing number of Skype appointments or text exchanges in which one of you asks the other what they've been up to, until someone finally calls it quits. It's like every long-distance relationship is a little universe expanding until it's stretched so thin it's meaningless. But it turns out the time is the bigger problem. Western Australia is 13 hours away from central daylight time, and 14 hours away from central standard time (on account of WA doesn't practice daylight savings time). This is annoying for business. You lose a day with every email exchange, ...

I was having a casual conversation with my friend Callum at the bar the other night. I said something about the fall -- I can't even remember what it was. He paused before responding, and asked if "fall" meant "autumn". It turns out Australians don't use the word "fall" to refer to the autumn because they don't have native deciduous trees. There is no such thing as the fall, here. Somehow, I had never considered that. I was suddenly struck by how profoundly the environment influences culture. I remember having the occasional disorienting linguistic observation when I lived in France, but I didn't expect that to happen here, where I thought I already spoke the language. It makes me wonder what the world would be like, if the British hadn't come to conquer all of it.