As temperatures soar and wildfires burn abroad, summer dread is returning to my body | Danielle Celemajer

As the Australian summer approaches, my apprehension is both a daily shock and uncannily normalised - and I know I'm not the only one feeling it

These days, when I come back into the house after being out on the land, it's dust that I drop, not the mud I carried in on my boots and clothes during the past three years when the rain kept everything, and everyone, sodden most of the time. The rain that also kept at bay the feeling of impending disaster that now attaches itself to the arrival of an Australian summer.

Not that La Nina was safe, as all of those whose homes and habitats were washed away know. But in the early months of 2023, as if the weather gods had snapped a finger, soaked turned to parched, and I find myself here again. Borne by news of soaring temperatures and wildfires in the northern hemisphere, the shift from a medium to a high likelihood of the arrival of El Nino to the official declaration of its onset, and the feeling of hardening earth under my feet, summer dread is returning to my body.