equinoctial

During the equinoctial rains, he spent the whole of a dismal day indoors, listening to the unceasing downpour on the outside of his log, watching it through his door and through portholes he had made—the infinite pall of falling rain, the sagging, wet vegetation, the drops dripping from everything as if counting themselves, the runnels and pools, the misty distances—and feeling an ancient melancholy.

What the local newspaper called a “stiff breeze,” the national Daily Mail called “equinoctial gales.”

By contrast, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini’s book on the elements, published posthumously in 1548, explained that Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes had all denied that the equator was habitable: ‘This question, which for many years was disputed between the greatest philosophers, experience has solved in our times. For from this new navigation of the Spaniards and especially of the Portuguese it has been discovered that there is habitation under the equinoctial circle and between the tropics, and that innumerable people dwell in these regions...’

We will never escape their chilly embrace, especially not in late October, when the air is crisp and the equinoctial mists circulate, when the unsleeping operator of the twenty-four-hour bodega acquires a red gleam in his eye.

One bright and fragrant spring day—as if on a wild equinoctial whim—Holmes suggested that Minnie invite her sister to Chicago to see the world’s fair, at his expense.