Lightning goes upwards as well

The cool change arrived early! We stopped the DVD, brought in the dry laundry, and opened all the windows and doors. The storm rolled over, spitting lightning and hurling rain. I'd been watching the rain approach on the BOM site since this morning. It was a thin band of red: heavy rain, but not for long.

When I was a kid, a hot spell was always followed by a cool change. We'd go to bed hot, and wake to a house still warm, but with cold air blowing in, and rain coming down outside. Bathroom tiles take a few hours to cool down. Cupboards exhale hot stale air when you open them.

The cool changes now are half-hearted. Am I just getting crotchety about how much better the old days were? I am only thirty-five!

Tonight I did not have a shower, even though I was sweaty and foul after a hot humid day stuck inside. When the rain came, after we opened up the house, I stood on the dry grass in the downpour with rain running down me. The sky was light, with pinky-grey glows on the horizon. The horizon is high up, here in the 'burbs. No idea where the glowing comes from.

Some lightning forked, and some lit up the whole sky.

Trudi stood in the rain with me for a while, and went inside when she got cold. I came in to make up the girls' bottles, then out I went again. I sat on the deck and thought.

I am angry that my girls will not know what a cool change used to be like. I think "cool change" is an Australian phrase. It means a lot to me. Now that the climate is changing, the cool change is moving south, into the ocean. I can see this from the radar images. The waves of lower pressure used to sweep from west to east, washing the whole of the southern continent like a windscreen wiper. Now the west-to-east thing still happens, but the wiper does not reach as far north. We miss out on our cool change, and the rain falls in the sea far to the south.

Save the planet. hah. The planet will be just fine, thankyou. Worse stuff than us has happened to this planet. The problem is saving the systems we depend on, and thus saving ourselves. Cool changes are nice and make me feel secure, but it's more than that. Tree frogs are cute and polar bears are fluffy, but they are just little cogs in the systems that sustain us.

So, my daughters will have very different lives from us. They won't know cool changes as I recall them, and they probably will never drink untreated water directly from a stream. More than that.

We do our best to give them the space and tools to become themselves, that they might grow into the best they can be. How useful will our help be in a world I can't imagine?

Then again, every generation grows up in a different world from the previous one. My parents learned to write on slates. They wrote on slices of stone with chalk! My grandmother once described to me the nightclubs that she went to in her youth. The waiters wore suits, and the tuxedoed pianist played a white grand piano while wearing white gloves. Her date paid for her cocktail, which she set into the nicely-designed recess in the arm of the club lounge in which she sat. No doubt the NYE dance parties tonight are different from the ones I went to. So maybe mourning the lost cool changes of my youth is just a natural stage; a sign of my age.

But. But! I had all these thoughts on the deck, with the rain running down my face. Lightning in the pink sky, and some premature fireworks popping a few houses down.

But, the very fact of each generation's new world is a symptom of the problem. Before the agricultural revolution, each generation of humans lived in much the same environment as the previous one. Sure, there were catastrophes and gradual changes, but most people lived lives like everyone before them. Once people invented farming things changed, and kept changing. Some people lived lives quite different from their grandparents.

Come the industrial revolution, the rate of change stepped up. Rapid changes propelled people out of their parents' ways of life. The rapid changes propagated rapidly, and many people lived different lives from their parents.

Now, most people live in very different ways from their parents. This is not just suburban Australians adjusting to living with their iPhones: everyone is adjusting to, and making, change. The changes have caught up with us, and the cool change is moving south, out of reach, and I'm angry about it.

So what do I do with my anger? I complain on my blog.

It's still raining. The radar suggests that a little more rain will fall tonight. Goodnight.