Nobody tells you about chinook winds when you’re deciding whether to take a job out here. They tell you about the altitude, the dry air, the way your lips crack in January if you don’t keep something in your coat pocket. Nobody mentions that a couple times a winter, out of nowhere, it’ll be forty degrees warmer than the day before and gusting sixty miles an hour, and every window in your apartment will sound like it’s about to come out of the frame.

I’ve lived here six years now, since the forecasting internship that turned into the job I still have, and I’ve stopped being surprised by the actual weather and started being surprised by how specifically it wrecks a plan. My best reading afternoons are the quiet ones, second bedroom, the shelf that’s slowly running out of room, a book I’ve been saving for a stretch with nothing else scheduled. A chinook does not care about your schedule. It rattles the whole building, it makes the cat we used to have (RIP, before your time if you’re new here) hide under the couch, and it turns a peaceful three hours into an afternoon of checking whether a branch is about to come through the window.

What’s strange is I’ve come to almost like it, or at least respect it, the way you respect a coworker who’s blunt but never actually wrong. There’s something almost funny about a fifty-degree temperature swing showing up mid-chapter like it’s got somewhere to be. I was partway through The Book of the New Sun during one of these last winter, that section where the world itself feels unstable and half-remembered, sun dying, architecture from different eras stacked on top of each other, and the actual walls of my apartment creaking around me did something to that reading experience I don’t think I could recreate on purpose. Sometimes the weather just gets it right by accident.

It’s also, I’ll admit, become part of how I plan game nights. Dana’s place is more sheltered than mine, older building, better windows, and if the forecast says chinook we just default to hosting there instead of even discussing it, the way you’d reroute around a road closure. I check wind forecasts now with something like the same attention I give delivery estimates for a Kickstarter, which Priya would say explains everything about how my brain works and she’s probably not wrong.

I don’t know that there’s a lesson in any of this beyond: if you move somewhere for a job, budget a little bit of your reading time for however that place decides to interrupt you. Mine just happens to come as a very specific, very loud kind of wind, a couple times a winter, right when I’ve finally gotten comfortable.