Weather

The weather has always been a topic of conversation; probably because it affects us generally as well as personally. It’s always with us, there’s no getting away from it. You can’t change it. It just IS. Weather comes in cycles and I think about it the same way. It certainly has my attention when warning reports of severe climate changes are due, but I barely acknowledge it when days of pleasant weather continue repeating.

I do take notice of particularly fine days when the air is soft and breezes balmy. I enjoy brisk, cold but sunny days that seduce one into long walks. Fog can be spell binding and mysterious while fresh fallen snow is often a delight.

Floods, cyclones, hurricanes, sand storms, drought and ice storms are the dreaded weather patterns of destruction. I’ve never been in a flood, but I remember how concerned my parents were in 1936 when the Ohio flooded Louisville, Kentucky where Dad’s parents and other family members lived. From Iowa where we lived, we listened intently during each radio broadcast describing the situation. Fortunately, none of the family suffered direct flooding. Later when we visited Grandma and Grandpa A., aunts, uncles and cousins in Louisville, Uncle Alvin showed us water marks on buildings in the flooded area indicating how high the water reached.

Back about the time I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, I woke one morning to find Mom and Dad along with several neighbors looking at Mom’s new ringer washing machine lying on the grass in the back yard. It had been on the back porch, but during the night, a cyclone blew thru the area. The wind took off the porch roof and one of the side walls and pushed the washing machine almost into the neighbor’s yard. Cyclone became a new word in my vocabulary.

I once experienced a sand storm when my daughter and I were driving toward a border crossing on our way to Mexico. The pinging sound of sand against the metal and windshield of the Corvair van I was driving grew louder as the sand got thicker. I had heard stories uncle Chester told of sand pitting the windshield and taking paint off his vehicle, and I worried that it would happen to the van if we continued driving. I looked for a safe place to park the van so the windshield could be pointed in the opposite direction of the blowing sand, but there weren’t any places to pull off the highway. Obscured vision required driving slowly, but eventually we passed thru the sand storm with little damage to either paint or glass.

The drought during the depression certainly helped to give my early years a universality of understanding the human condition. Day after day the sun shone with never a rain cloud in sight. The radio news of weather was anxiously awaited by farmers and town people alike. Newspaper accounts and photos of withering corn and wheat fields, of dirt clouds blotting out the sun and farmers pulling up stakes and leaving behind what they couldn’t strap to their model T fords as they headed west to better climes, are childhood memories still vivid in my mind.

Ice storms are exquisitely beautiful. The brilliance of sun reflecting off ice crystals is so sharp it’s brittle. Where fog obscures and hides, ice coats and delineates shape and size. When the weight of ice on tree branches make them break, the cracking sound is like a gun shot, quick and piercing. The freeze often causes undo hardship when there are broken water pipes, downed electrical and phone wires and icy highways. A few years ago I lived thru an ice storm in Texas that caused an eight day electrical outage. I don’t know which is worse, an outage of long duration or broken water pipes and being last on a plumber’s ‘fix it’ list.

I have saved old letters from family members who lived on farms in the Midwest and in the south. Along with their state of health, they always mentioned weather, the state of the crops and the wish that good harvest weather would hold. Aunt Lily, who lived in Nebraska, also described her kitchen garden and told how many jars of fruit and veggies she was canning.

Because the family is so far flung, I have devised a way of using daily weather temps to let me know how those near and dear to me start their day. On my computer home page I have a long list of the following cities with daily a.m. temps: Houston, TX; Hollister, CA; Baton Rouge, LA; Groesbeck, TX; Santa Clara, CA; Oskaloosa, IA; Canton, GA; Yuma, AR; Paulden, AR; Mt. View, CA; Long Beach, CA; Buena Park, CA; Norwood, MO; Lancaster, CA; Loma Linda, CA