Two posts in one day!
I went for a walk in the early evening and the sky didn't look like summer, cloaked in those smooth pearled clouds and the air was filled with a light drizzle.  I walked all the way down to Beaufort Street in this light misty rain and my hair was barely wet.  But the dampness on the warm roads brought ut all the smells of sand, dust, eucalytpus leaves (which is beautiful), but also the stinks of old oil and god knows what from the gutters.  It was a peculiar mixture.  Very un-Perth-like.  More akin to areas to the north, the tropics.  I remember when I went to Indonesia (more than a decade ago), Phil & I got cauight in the massive thunderstorms that began the monsoons. It was amazing - never seen rain like it, and the silence afterwards was almost magical.
Tonight had something of that sense - none of the dramatics, none of the intensity, but yet there was something of it.
Watching the lights coming on against the misty air, the city blurred and softened by it, it looked like winter.  The light wind had a gentle coolth that ameliorated the warm humidity, so it didn't feel like winter, but the grey waning light, headlights coming on, people hurrying with umbrellas and heads down - very wintry looking in its shades and shapes, sounds and movment.  Only the temperature was wrong.
For the last few days, the light has been strange: less bright, less harsh and searing, even when the sun is out.  Though, if you stand in the sun, it's incredibly hot.  Thick as melted butter.  All the dampness in the air.  Still, it looks more like winter than summer.
This is a peculiar start to the season I dread, though we've already had our first heatwave.  And I was in the middle of serious writing.  It's really hard to write when it's over 35 and we had several days of it.  This weekend will also be getting up to 35.
Just now, it's been raining lightly again, barely enough to dampen the ground, to tap lightly on the pergola roof and the skylight and fill the air with those smells and the sounds of car tyres on damp roads, nothing more.
The most amazing thing is the silence this weather brings, especialy at night.  There is the traffic outside the door (it's not anywhere near cool enough to have doors and windows closed), but still, there is a silence beneath those superficial sounds that nothing can touch.,  A kind of immanence.  As though there is heavy rain or a storm.  There is neither.  Just the sense of something coming.
I wonder if this is something like - a very pale approximation - the 'build-up' in the tropics, before the rains hit.  There are no thunderstorms or anything dramatic, and the humidity is nowhere near as high, but that sense of immanence - I wonder.