Ashy

Inspirational song: Runaround Sue (Dion)

I was sitting here in my overly warm, non-air-conditioned mid-century ranch home, thinking after a day like this that it was going to be another one of those summers, where we skip spring altogether and jump right into blazing hot, endlessly sunny days. I have been miserable driving around in the daytime this last week, with the sun scorching me. (Remember, the meds I take for lupus make my sun sensitivity worse, not better.) I was checking the 15 day forecast on my phone, before I started making sweeping pronouncements about how awful the summer was going to be, and then I watched the end of a news program. It was an innocuous story about Mount Kilauea erupting, and it triggered a memory that made me rethink my prediction.

Way back in the early 90s, I was a young mother, about to have my second baby, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It was only of passing interest to me at the time. I had more immediate concerns. It wasn’t until months later that I realized the effect it was having on us, on the other side of the world. It filled the atmosphere with particulates of ash and sulfuric acid, and it lowered global temperatures for two years after eruption. I couldn’t tell you exactly which year it was now, maybe 1992 or 1993, but we had one of those “years without a summer” where it barely crested 90 degrees in Colorado, if it ever hit it at all. I remember hanging out in a park with friends at our regular Saturday gathering, and it was so cold and rainy in July that we were miserable and just wanted to go home.

Now I’m not saying that it will be as bad as the early 90s. I know Pinatubo was the second largest eruption since Krakatoa. I have no idea how big an eruption the Kilauea one will end up being. As it is, the blast today went up 30,000, to cruising altitude for commercial jets. Will there be more? Dunno. I am not a vulcanologist. Will it be enough to affect weather this summer? Dunno. I am also not a meteorologist. However, I am a middle-aged woman, who pays attention to such things as weather, and I have a reasonable suspicion that it just might make a difference. If this summer is a little hazier than usual, and a little cooler than usual, I will be totally fine with that. In a few weeks, I'll start watching the sunsets, to see whether they are as red and hazy as they were those months after Pinatubo, and I'll decide whether my folksy wisdom about the weather has any merit.