Last Friday evening the temperature finally dropped below 86°F (30°C).
I stepped outside, felt the faintest breeze on my face, and nearly cried with relief.
I know that sounds dramatic. But after a week of sleeping in rooms that never cooled down, waking up nauseous from the heat, and watching our little dog Sophie struggle to function, that tiny breeze felt nothing short of miraculous.
I’ve never been as psychologically exhausted by weather as I was by this heatwave. And I don’t think I’m alone.
France just lived through its most intense heatwave on record. Tuesday, June 24th was officially the hottest day the country has ever measured, beating the records set in 2003 and again in 2019. Temperatures climbed above 107°F (42°C) in some regions. A record number of departments - more than half the country - were placed on the highest heat alert. Schools closed. Festivals were cancelled. Hospitals saw a surge in heat-related emergencies, and Santé Publique France later confirmed the heatwave was linked to over a thousand additional deaths nationwide, most of them people over 75.
At times, it all felt strangely familiar.
The constant government alerts on our phones. Television screens filled with maps of France glowing bright red. Endless reminders to stay indoors, avoid unnecessary travel, check on elderly neighbors, and to drink plenty of water. For a moment, it reminded me of the Covid lockdowns - not because the situations were comparable, but because everyday life suddenly revolved, again, around an invisible threat we couldn’t negotiate with.
Our week, in retreat.
Our apartment is on the third floor of an old building here in Brittany. Usually, that’s never been a problem. This year it became an oven.
By the third day of extreme heat, we admitted defeat. We packed a few bags, grabbed Sophie, and drove to my mum’s house closer to the coast, hoping the ocean breeze would help.
It did, but only slightly.
The ground floor stayed a few degrees cooler than upstairs, so we dragged mattresses into the living room and slept there for the rest of the week, waiting for the canicule to pass.
Every morning I woke up mildly nauseous after another restless night. At 5 a.m., I’d open every window, hoping cool air had arrived overnight. It never had. By six, we were already closing the shutters and sealing the house shut before the sun took over. By nine, it was already above 90°F (32°C). By noon, 100°F (38°C) or more.
My days shrank down to small, slightly absurd survival rituals: freezing wet towels to lay over us later in the day, or over Sophie, who spent most of her time stretched flat across the kitchen tiles, the coolest spot in the house. Refilling ice cube trays. Trying, and failing, to buy a fan, because every store and every website in the region was sold out.
The evenings were somehow the hardest. Normally, French houses cool down after sunset - that’s the trick we’ve relied on for generations: keep the heat out during the day, let the night air in to reset everything.
Except there was no cool night air this time. Outside felt almost as hot as inside. The walls, having absorbed heat all day, radiated it back all night. The house stopped feeling like it was breathing.
A few times, I found myself genuinely worried - about elderly relatives, about friends in apartments even hotter than ours, about Sophie, who stopped eating and barely moved.
At some point I stopped watching the news altogether. I couldn’t take one more glowing red weather map, or one more heated debate about France’s lack of air conditioning.
And here, honestly, I know we were among the lucky ones. We had a ground floor to retreat to, proper shutters, several rooms to spread across so we weren’t all living on top of each other. Some people didn’t have that - especially in cities, in small top-floor apartments, in Paris, where the famous zinc roofs turned attics into furnaces. My social media feed filled up with people trading tips to keep their homes liveable, from taping foil to windows to coating them in blanc de meudon - a chalky white paste normally used on greenhouse glass to bounce back the sun, and which, unsurprisingly, is now sold out almost everywhere too.
Then, last Friday around 9 p.m., everything changed. The temperature dipped below 86°F (30°C). We stepped outside. A light breeze crossed the garden. It might have been one of the happiest moments I’ve had in years - I only realized afterward how much tension my body had been carrying.
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