The Weather That Returns You

Almost everyone has a version of this and almost nobody has a name for it. It is not nostalgia, exactly — nostalgia is something you go looking for. This arrives uninvited, in a doorway, from a temperature.

It is also not random. There is a straightforward reason weather does this better than anything else, and once you see the mechanism you can do one small useful thing with it.

Why weather is such a strong trigger

Most of what we remember is filed under events. Weather is filed under nothing, which is precisely why it works.

An ordinary afternoon does not get remembered on purpose. But everything present in the room while it happened — the light level, the temperature of the air, the particular smell of cold or wet ground or hot pavement, the sound the outside was making — gets recorded alongside it, unlabelled, as context. And the sense that carries the most of this is smell, which reaches memory by a shorter route than sight or sound and arrives with far less processing. Weather is an enormous, immersive smell delivered at body temperature. It is close to the most complete re-creation of a past environment you can experience while awake.

The second reason is that weather is involuntary. You cannot decide to encounter a particular October afternoon. When it happens, nothing in you had time to brace for it, and unbraced memory is far more vivid than the kind you go and fetch.

A photograph shows you the past. Weather puts you back in it, briefly, without asking.

The pile-up effect

Here is the part that makes seasons different from every other kind of recurrence.

Each year's version of a particular week is stored on top of the last one. Not beside it — on top. The same low light, the same wet-ground smell, the same temperature in the same doorway, thirty or forty times in a life, each time layered over an identical set of conditions.

Ordinary memory does not stack like this. There is no other cue in your life that repeats with such fidelity: the exact combination of light angle, air temperature, humidity and smell that a particular fortnight produces is remarkably consistent, decade after decade, and nothing else you encounter comes close.

So when it triggers, it does not pull out one memory. It pulls at the whole stack, which is why the sensation is so strangely thick — it feels like more than a memory because it is more than one. What you are getting is every version of these weeks at once, with whichever is loudest on top.

This is also why the returns get stronger with age rather than fading. The stack is taller. A fifteen-year-old has four or five layers of any given season. Someone twice that has a dozen more, pressed into the same ten minutes of air.

The same door, both directions

We should be careful here, because articles about this always describe the pleasant version.

The stack does not sort. Whatever happened in those weeks is in there, and if a hard stretch of your life sat in a particular season, that season brings it back on the same schedule as everything else. The mechanism is completely indifferent to content. It is not a memory of good things that happens to include some bad ones; it is a memory of conditions, and the conditions were there for all of it.

People notice this most when a season arrives and their mood changes before they have identified why. The air did its work, the stack came up, and the explanation followed several minutes later — sometimes several days later, sometimes not at all.

Writing it down changes what you get back

The one useful move here is small and it is not about the return itself. It is about what you are laying down for later.

When the pile-up hits, the layers that surface are the ones with the most detail attached. Anything you have written about a season becomes a much better-defined layer, because you rehearsed it once in words and gave it edges. This is the long-term dividend of keeping seasonal notes, and it takes years to pay — which is exactly why almost nobody does it.

1. 1

   Write about the conditions, not the events

   Events you will remember anyway. Write down the light, the smell, what the street sounded like, how cold your hands were. Those are the things the weather will use as handles later, and they are the first things to disappear.

2. 2

   Keep it to a few lines

   Three lines is enough — the moment a seasonal note becomes an essay it stops happening, and a note that stops happening leaves no layer at all. Short and annual beats thorough and abandoned.

3. 3

   Date it properly

   Not the month. The actual date. Half the pleasure of reading these back years later is discovering that the turn of a season lands within a few days of itself, over and over, without your involvement.

4. 4

   Write the ordinary ones too

   The instinct is to record only remarkable weeks. Do the flat ones as well. Those are the layers that vanish completely otherwise, and they turn out to be the ones that carry the most surprise on the way back up.

The journal is sized for this, if it suits you. Paper is equally good. What matters is that it survives a decade, which rules out most apps and most notebooks.

Adding this year to the pile

You are, right now, in the middle of making one of these layers. It will surface at some point in the next thirty years, unannounced, when you step outside on the correct kind of day.

There is nothing to do about that and no way to influence which parts come back. It is one of the very few things about your own memory that you are simply a bystander to — the filing happens whether you attend to it or not, and the retrieval happens on the weather's schedule rather than yours.

What you can do is write four lines about what this stretch of the year has actually been like, so that when the air comes back for it, there is something with edges waiting.

The evening is warm here.