Weather: why we can't stop talking about it.

A blog friend of mine recently mentioned how tedious it is to listen to people talking about the weather (the weather in Santa Cruz is not especially changeable) and this reminded me how I used to, a long time ago, think that endless discussions about predicted storms, cold snaps, and debates about whether it would or would not rain tomorrow was about as inane as conversation could get.

Until I started gardening.  Until I began to own things that might get ruined by rain leaking through garage roofs.  When we started having to pay for energy to heat our own home we looked at weather much more personally.  Owning our first home changed everything. 

Wait, that's a lie.  I have always been mildly obsessed by the weather, I simply didn't discover that anyone else was similarly obsessed until I became a home owner and started talking to other home owners whose house and belongings could be profoundly influenced to work, or not work, if the temperatures hit lower than freezing. 

Another blog friend brought this same topic up several months ago, how strange it is that people can get so focused on precipitation and clouds and find nothing better to discuss.

I think now is the perfect moment to explain, from my point of view, why talking about the weather is one of the most basic and important things that people feel compelled to discuss.

First of all, weather happens to everyone.  Unlike putting on secret underwear in the morning, which only very lucky Mormons have the pleasure of doing and so can't discuss the topic with anyone but similarly fortunate religious super-stars.  Weather happens universally to absolutely every single human being on earth which makes it the most universal topic there is.  Even better than that, it brings people together regionally whether it's always annoyingly 75 degrees, like in San Diego, or it's turbulent and extreme as it is in Florida or Michigan, what's happening in your climate is the same thing that's happening to everyone else who's hanging out under the same sky you are. 

Secondly, it's my opinion that it's hard-wired into humans to be constantly monitoring what's going and coming in the atmosphere because there was a time when shelter was a much more serious concern for all of us* and our shoe situation was either dire or nonexistent and our clothes were a much more rudimentary affair.  Back when we were nearly all wandering tribes we were 100% at the mercy of the atmospheric temperature, the weather conditions, and we were extremely vulnerable to every fluctuation and gust.  Now the majority of us can go inside our houses, turn the heat on, curl up under blankets, and watch California beach movies** when we want to forget it's only 20 degrees outside.

And onwards...light is known to have a big effect on most animals.  How many hours of light there are in a day decides whether or not certain vegetables will bulb up or go to seed instead; whether hens will lay eggs or not, and whether people get so depressed they want to die or, conversely, jump for joy.  Light, temperature, and precipitation guides almost every aspect of farming, of animal husbandry, of how we prepare for the hours ahead, the weeks, and the months of needing to protect ourselves from extremes.  If farmers are unprepared for cold snaps and lose entire crops, people have less access to food.  It's easy to forget this because most of us in the USA can saunter off to the grocery store to buy apples from New Zealand or avocados from Chile.  This gives us a false sense of security that we aren't at the mercy of weather.

But we still are.  Every year people without the money to heat their homes or who don't even have homes at all die in the cold.  Every year during soaring heat waves where there is no air conditioning people die of heat stroke.  Floods from great storms sweep through coastal towns destroying our flimsy architecture and they often take people with it too.  Snow can fall in such deep drifts that people are trapped wherever they are and some get lost or die because all our human endeavors to create roads and paths from one enclave to another are useless when nature gets a wild winter hair in her ass and joyously dumps feet of the fluffy down on us somewhat naked mammals.

My mood is profoundly effected by the weather which makes me watch it for a kind of mood barometer.  If I hear it's going to be bright, sunny, and - HOLY SHIT - hot, I can predict with certainty that I will feel sluggish, uncomfortable, sweaty, and that I will possibly have a heat rash, headache, and in extreme conditions, nausea.  I hate bright hot weather.  It depresses me as well as makes me angry.  Some sunshine is good, especially with a bit of a briskness in the air, this can uplift my mood.  But if I'm stuck out in it I act like an animal that's got a hot fire poker shoved up its nose. 

When other human beings are experiencing what we call SAD, I am being released from my own seasonal affective disorder.  When the temperatures drop, the clouds roll in, the rain pelts down in icy rivulets, even if it's going down my leg, my mood improves amazingly.  When storms roll in I get very excited, like a little kid, when those crazy 80 mile an hour winds carry broken branches on their tail and deliver rain like horizontal bullets against your windows or face I become so elated I worry that I might actually rip wide open for the wild joy of it.  Every single time it snows it feels like my first snow fall and I just stop and watch.  It's distracting and difficult for me to carry on like a responsible adult when there's snow to watch, to walk in, to fall into, to eat, to enjoy.  We had a record three feet of it last year and for me, Max, and Philip it was so perfect!  We enjoyed the extremeness of going five miles an hour in the car just to get a mile away. 

I love very cold weather but this year it was brought home to me how much I don't like my home to feel as cold inside as it is outside.  Until I got a really wonderful order on Etsy from my friend Taj (followed by more orders from friends- I'm very thankful to all of you!!) I was facing a month of not being able to afford to turn on the heater in our house.  For several days we went without it while the temperatures outside began to drop.  I became really depressed to be in a situation, for the first time in my adult life where I didn't have the option to get comfortable.  Living in California the last time I was really poor, in an apartment building in which the utilities were included in rent, this was never an issue.

My thoughts have been on homeless people a lot in the past couple of weeks and while I watch the weather and talk about the weather with every other interested soul, I keep sending my love to everyone sleeping crunched as close to walls as possible outside to keep from freezing to death, without any shelter at all, without family, without food.  I am not in a position to help many right now but I have been asking myself what I propose to do within my abilities.  Most food banks need food right now but don't take home made food.  Packaged soup is way more expensive and less nourishing than home made and I can't afford to buy a lot of packaged food for other families.  So I'm going to call my local soup kitchen and see about the three of us volunteering some hours this holiday.  Perhaps I can bring some raw ingredients for use in the soups they make. 

Blankets.  I barely have enough time to do my own sewing but while I see a million clothing articles available to the poor at my local Salvation Army, I have not seen any blankets. 

It isn't the upcoming holiday that has me thinking about others. 

And that's the point I'd like to make:  it's weather that has me thinking of other people and asking myself what I can do within my own limitations.  Not turning the heat on as the temperatures dropped was depressing and uncomfortable for me but I am acutely aware of how lucky I am to even have my own home and to have down comforters and family and friends who do so much to help us through our tough moments.  I hate it when other people tell me how lucky I am because it suggests that I have no right to complain about my troubles and worries and that perhaps I am obtuse and possibly too selfish to understand my own fortune.

The unluckier you get the more people like to remind you how lucky you are.  It's truly perverse.

I will always unabashedly love the heart of winter when weak branches snap under the weight of snow, when the slow hares become the meager fare for mountain lions, when every creature is looking for the warmest spot to sleep off the bleak winds.  It is mine.  This is the season when my joy rebounds easily and I get the closest it's possible for me to get to the light of living.  My mind is quicker, my heart more open, my spirit grows, and I am completely in my element.  I am a snow bird, always looking north. 

Weather.  It is the most universal thread between us all.  Even when we're not having dramatic weather events we are dreaming them because nothing makes us feel more together than to experience weather under the same sky. 

Weather is the most powerful influence on human survival.

Whether the whole earth freezes over, as it has done before or whether it heats up completely melting snow and wiping entire species out, as it is doing now, weather is a profound subject.






*The time in history when it wasn't just the very poor who didn't have homes to live in, but no one did and had to seek the shelter of caves, tree cover, or hold flimsy tanned furs above their heads like a grandly inefficient prehistoric umbrella.  (I'm going to have that stuck in my head all day long "prehistoric umbrella".  I'll probably accidentally say it out loud as well and scare the scary hair cutter I will inevitably get.)

**Firstly, my Kung Fu teacher and his family are living in an unfinished house and so even though they aren't homeless, they are freezing right now!  And also, just for the record, I LOATHE warm beaches and never find comfort or amusement in beach movies.  Just want to be clear about that.