It always is an exciting time in Abu Dhabi when you decide — or at least hope — that the season is changing.

From summer to … what I think of as not summer.

And a sign of that shift? No, not leaves falling. (We would have to have trees other than palms.) Not the breaking out of winter coats. (No one here needs a winter coat; only frequent travelers or clothes horses even own one.)

Abu Dhabi’s “summer is over” moment?

Turning on the water heater.

For half the year here, in the United Arab Emirates, you have no need to heat the water in which you bathe. It already is plenty warm just coming out of the tap.

We go six months with water coming out of every spigot at whatever temperature it happens to be. Certainly not cold, which would be a problem if anyone here drank tap water. Hot enough to wash dishes. Not so hot as to scald. Not quite.

It’s actually rather queer. Unheated water. From April through October. No “hot” and “cold” valves. Just the one variety of water. Hot.

The water mains here must be buried not far below the surface of the ground because the searing temperatures of our six-month summer heat up the water quite thoroughly. Well into the 90s (Fahrenheit). Actually, there are times in, say, August when our “unheated” water is almost too hot to have on your skin. Borderline scalding. Uncomfortable, for sure.

But now that we are almost to November, with daytime highs not crossing 100 and overnight lows “plunging” into the middle 70s, well, the water is cooling off.

But we don’t count the summer as being over until we try to shower … and the water is cooler than what we prefer.

That blessed moment occurred this week. An almost startling event.

I turned on the tap, and I knew I didn’t need a shower quite the cold. Hmm. So, with less ceremony than the moment deserved, I flipped the switch that heats the water in a reservoir up above our apartment.

Ta-da!

End of summer. In theory.

We have only two seasons here, really. Summer and Not Summer. One is hard,  very hard. The other is shorter but quite pleasant. Spring and Fall? Not so’s you’d notice. The season we look forward to … when it’s something other than summer, and it apparentlyhas arrived.

The Igniting of the Water Heaters ought to be a national holiday here.

We are celebrating it, anyway.