It’s that time of year when the weather is glorious, but lurches from high summer to chilly spring with very little warning. It’s the time when I scramble to figure out what I wear in summer and what we eat when it’s too hot to cook and which sunscreen I should buy this year and who needs new sandals. (Me. I need new sandals.) And then after complaining that it’s too hot one day, I’m back pulling out an extra blanket and finding a fleece that I’d put away and carping that nobody can see my pretty new toenails the next.

In other words, it’s spring in DC. The Americans can’t fathom it when I tell them this 75-degree weather is like the most sun-burnished summer day imaginable in Ireland. The Irish people will be spitting in July when I’m so done with 90 degrees and a million percent humidity and the need, the so tedious need, to take the kids to the pool again today because what on earth else can we do except flop around a darkened house complaining about needing a cold drink and an ice-pop and maybe a penguin habitat.

But the kids are playing outside a lot, which can only be a good thing. Dash has a baseball game twice a week and practice on Saturdays, and can also be found playing soccer on the street (thank goodness for cul-de-sacs) most of the time. Mabel eschews balls, but cruises around on her bike or her scooter and has taken up sidewalk chalking too. Soon the mosquitoes will be out in full force once it’s past 6pm or so, but for now it’s really very pleasant.

One day last week was a really hot one. I went to the supermarket early, straight after dropping Mabel to school, and when I came out the full blast of heat from the parking-lot asphalt hit me, the way it does when you come out of an air-conditioned environment; the way you never ever experience it in Ireland. “Ugh, it feels like America,” I thought, unbidden.

Well, that’s funny, I followed up with. It’s always America. But this felt like that other America, not the one I live in every day, but the one I used to visit sometimes, or the one that was new and strange still. It was like the America that was Texas, probably, most of all. It wasn’t just the heat; it was the unsalubrious surroundings of our frankly kind of ghetto little mall, and a tiny moment when the familiar became unfamiliar again. In the same way that the damp concrete footpaths of Dublin will always be absolutely home with their every nook and cranny and patch of moss and littering crisp-packet, the beating heat of crumbling grey asphalt and faded yellow paint will always be alien to my heart no matter how long I’m here.