One of the great voyages of this world’s history, one that included most of us in Washington as passengers, neared its conclusion amid Sunday’s chill, a chill that seemed colder than normal for this closing stage of the trip.
The trip, of course, is the one that Earth makes each year around the sun, and it usually begins and ends among days of little warmth, little daylight and much darkness.
On Sunday, the 52nd and last Sunday of 2025, the high temperature in Washington was 42 degrees. That was 10 above freezing, which seemed perhaps creditable.
But it was 4 degrees below the 46 that is the normal high temperature in the capital on Dec. 28, three days from the eve of a new year.
In a way, however, it does not seem inconsistent with the details of the route of the planetary voyage. By rough calculation, Earth has traveled about 580 million miles around the sun to return to the place where the trip started.
And for much of the northern hemisphere, the place where it began is meteorologically a cold place.
On Jan. 1, 2025, when the current orbit of the sun began, the high temperature in Washington was 52 degrees, according to National Weather Service records. That was a little warmer than might have been expected for the cold weather portion of the trip.
If not indisputably warm, the reading of 52 was 10 degrees warmer than Sunday. Last year on Sunday’s date, the temperature was closer to the New Year’s Day reading. It was an above-normal 53.
Even so, Sunday, with its high temperature of 42, may have been tolerable. It did not seem representative of winter at its worst. But it wore the look of winter. It was overcast and gray.
It was clouds, clouds, clouds, blanketing the District from sunrise to sunset. As clouds go, they seemed relatively featureless, resembling one broad expanse of gray, with few discernible streaks or ridges or seams.
To an extent, Sunday might have been a day of incipient celebration, of at least preparing to mark the conclusion of a celestial voyage of many days and many miles.
But it appeared that any merriment might have had to be self-initiated. The sky, with its absence of sun, and with its uniform grayness, did not seem to encourage the expressions of joy or jollity that might have been prompted by the approaching end of a long, long trip.
But Sunday, at least as of 5 p.m., neither snowed nor rained, not in Washington, and for many in Washington, that lack of snow in itself was greatly to Sunday’s credit.
It suggested that the multi-million-mile excursion around the sun was ending in a way that was really not so bad after all.
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