We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
These four swimmers posed near the starting platforms at the recent swim meet hosted at the Chinook Swim Pool. They were decked out in swim gear but huddled in blankets, robes, coats and towels to deal with an unusually cool summer morning. They were experiencing "Juneuary," a term created in the Pacific Northwest that describes cold and dreary weather that is reminiscent of winter but is happening in early summer.
Part of my early morning routine is to look back in my digital diary to see what happened on this same date over the past eight or so years I've been keeping the diary. Part of each entry is the daily temperature early in the morning, the forecast for the upcoming day and a comment or two about the current weather conditions. Last Sunday morning (June 16) the temperature at 5am was 47 degrees, (and "feels like 41") with near 30 mph winds starting mid-morning and blowing most of the rest of daylight.
I was committed to help at the Chinook Lions Club pronto pup stand at the weekend swim meet being hosted at the Chinook Swim Pool. The diary comment of interest to me for this day was recorded in 2023 in a letter from our daughter who lives in metro Seattle. She wrote: "Well, it's Juneuary here, summer will not really begin until July 1st." That was the first time I'd ever heard or read of Juneuary. I asked our daughter about Juneuary and then looked at online posts and comments regarding the phenomenon. Here's a bit of what I learned about the origin of the term Juneuary and what it has come to mean.
Juneuary was coined online by a Washington state resident in a text in 2007
I never could find an actual name of the person credited with first using Juneuary to describe weather in June in the Seattle area. The word describes the typical weather pattern in western Washington when June's weather often starts mild, calm and even warmish then deteriorates to colder than expected for early summer with drizzles for long periods and stronger than normally anticipated winds. In short, "It's like having January weather in June," hence, "Juneuary."
Juneuary must have taken hold fairly quickly among those keeping up with new words and ideas springing from social media. My wife and I moved to western Washington about five years after the term was coined. I was kind of surprised it took us another 16 years to be aware there was a term to describe what back then we called just plain old "crappy Seattle early summer weather."
Juneuary is a term that applies equally well to early summer weather on the Hi-Line
Often late spring/early summer's weather on the Hi-Line can accurately be described using the term Juneuary. Toward the end of this recent May my wife and I had packed up the heavy blankets and electric foot warmers from our bed. Whoops, we just got the winter gear packed away when the temperature dropped and random snow storms began to show up. We dragged out the heavy blankets and piled them on the bed. It was Juneuary.
Reading the diary post reminded me of Juneuary. The weekend of the most recent swim meet started a bit cooler on Saturday, but tolerable. Despite some threat of rain, swimmers and spectators who accompanied them to the meet were enjoying the outdoors watching the swimmers and visiting with other parents and swimmers. There were "sun shades" of all sorts and designs around the edges of the pool and even along the surrounding streets by the pool.
Sunday, the second day of the swim meet, dawned cloudy, windy and "47 degrees, feels like 41." That definitely felt like Juneuary. By the time swimming started on Sunday morning most of the area along the pool was bare of shades, tents and spectators. Rather than running around in just swimming suits, the competitors were wrapped in layers of pajamas, bathrobes, coats and extra clothing (many from mom or dad or an older sibling from how the clothing fit the swimmers). Contestants were coping as best they could with the intrusion of Juneuary. And cope they did, right to the last hurrah when the final swimming competitions were done and folks loaded up to head home on Sunday afternoon.
When that next round of rotten early summer weather hits our area, take a page from the dictionary of "Seattle-isms" and call the weather what it is-January's weather in June or, our new word for the day, Juneuary. And if you hear someone refer to that weather as "June Gloom," educate them about the more modern description for this type of early summer weather. Tell them, "It's now called Juneuary."
