Weather

Yes, everybody talks about it and no one does anything about it. Here in New England I’ve been told, we have “weather”, not climate. It’s why we talk about it so much. It changes and it surprises. It is often inconvenient and very annoying. Yesterday it struck me that it was quite simply wrong.

Weather is like crime. There are felonies and misdemeanors. Felonies are criminal and everyone knows what they are without doubt: hurricanes and floods and droughts. They are horrors and deserving of the great minds of the world. These ruminations deal with the misdemeanor category and a much smaller mind.

It was an apparently typical mid-November afternoon with rain steadily dripping from the (soon to be cleaned out, I hope) gutters. It was appropriately gray. The trees were bare-boned black skeletons with the wet frippery of autumn petticoats lying around their skinny ankles. However, it was hot~65 degrees hot, and this felt very, very wrong. Where do these feelings of weather inappropriateness come from anyway? The innoculation of weather expectations was most likely administered in childhood via Grandma Moses illustrations and years of grade school singing of “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

It also has something to do with living in New England in November. We live at the source of the myth. It is mecca. No matter the real back story, the Massachusetts Mayflower PR guys were better than the Jamestown team. The Indians aren’t going to be helpful and the turkey won’t taste the same if it’s not cold and bleak. The porch windows are supposed to be fogged from the steam of cooking and not because the air outside is warmer than the air inside. This familiar aura of coziness is but a sham.

Whatever aberration of weather band that it was has now blown through. It is blustery and chilly. The leaves are blowing back onto the raked lawn (sigh) and the skeletal trees are swaying wildly in the wind. It is distinctly inhospitable out there and this feels right. Things are as they should be.

Happy Thanksgiving