Everyone talks about it. I used to think it was this silly conversation or discussion or start of making the best of nothing else to talk about, but it’s not. It’s the Spanx of humanity, controlling yet not quite something anyone can get their hands around. No behavioral control. Roams on its own. Influenced by patterns and temperatures and atmosphere.
To think about how awful weather is to me, a Type A person who wants to shape it all… it’s very hard to deal with. But weather really dictates a lot of what we do as humans and it kinda sucks sometimes. It makes or breaks the farmer. It devastates. It makes plane rides suck. It makes arthritis activate. It feeds. It causes mold and dents cars and waters lawns and wrecks ships.
It’s terribly turbulent.
My Grandma Esther contributed to lengthy conversation about weather. She spent many a hour perched in her chair watching it all unfold on television. No matter our location, our weather she knew. In New York City, the weather dictates your attire and keeps you inside during summer and winter. Inside bars, that is, and book stores and movie theaters and buses and cabs and long afternoons under the awnings of the Coney Island boardwalk. In Denver, the weather dictates your traffic perils. Everyone stops at the puddle, afraid. In Kansas, the weather is bleak with elephantine blizzards and dusk thunderstorms you can see for miles. Wee funnels bouncing up and down, unsure of how to grow up… bigger, more confident twisters take to the ground and whip up the dirt like an old fashioned egg beater. Want some cow and bathtub in your cake? No problem! Just two seconds and I’ll have that for you.
I read that a high school graduate was sucked from his car as he drove home on the afternoon of his graduation in Joplin, Missouri. Yes, sucked out by the force of a twister. Have you ever heard one? Frightening. Yes, it sucked him out of his car. Yes. Yes.
Anyways, time to watch the pouring rain outside my house and feel the cool air blow through the windows that keep me safe from being sucked out by twisters, that keep me warm from the snow storms and keep the ever-growing weeds and trees from bungling into my kitchen and up through the floors and making my life into the literal jungle it might be if we let those Spanx get the best of us and stopped trying to control the few parts of the sky that we can.
Don’t let it get you, too.
