Any longtime reader of DCist knows that many of us, particularly your editor here, find it funny how the nation’s capital is more likely to fall to its knees in absolute supplication when there is the threat of snow than when there’s an orange-level terrorist alert. We can take the snow, we can take the intense heat. It’s just when Mother Nature hasn’t decided what she wants to do with us is when we become irritable. Alistair Cooke, in a 1949 “Letter From America” for the BBC perhaps put it best:

Washington lies securely in what the guidebooks call an amphitheatre and what you and I call a swamp. And it has a damp, wheezy, Dickensian sort of winter hardly equalled by London, and a steaming tropical summer not surpassed by the basin of the Nile, or those outposts on the Persian gulf where bad vice-consuls are sent to rot.

Potomac springs can be fleeting, going from cold rainy depression to humid summer doldrums in a matter of days. And right now, we’re stuck in someone’s demented dream of fusing weather conditions described in “Wuthering Heights” with those in “Heart of Darkness.” Take this past evening for instance. After we finally shrugged off a damp conclusion to winter with a few days of beautiful weather in the 70s, rain moved in during the early evening and created a boggish steamy spring evening, with some rain mixed in with the relative heat and intense humidity.