I used to apologize for talking about the weather, as if it were a failure of imagination. Then I lived through a summer that smelled like smoke three states away, and a winter that forgot how to freeze, and I stopped apologizing.
Weather is the plot we are all inside. We pretend it is small talk because naming it is one of the last public intimacies we have. You can say “the wind today” to a stranger and both of you will have a body that agrees.
A field guide to ordinary weather would not begin with disasters, though disasters are no longer rare enough to be called exceptions. It would begin with the days that do not make the news. The slightly too-warm Tuesday in February. The rain that cannot decide whether it is a mist or a commitment. The afternoon when the light goes metallic and your fillings, if you have them, seem to hum.
I keep a weather notebook, which sounds precious until you see how little I write. “West wind. Soil dark. First fungus on the stump.” That is a whole entry. Over a year it becomes a private almanac. I can tell you now that the stump mushrooms arrive, in this yard, about a week after the night temperatures stop dropping below a number I never used to track.
Ordinary weather is disappearing into the category of the remarkable, which is a loss even when the remarkable is beautiful. People post sunsets as if the sky had done a trick. The sky does that trick because of particles and angle. You can love it and still refuse to treat it as content. I try to watch the sunset without taking it, the way you try to listen to a friend without already composing your reply.
There are practical reasons to learn your local weather in a finer grain. Gardeners know this. So do people who walk to work. The rest of us outsourced the knowledge to an icon on a phone, which is a useful liar. The icon cannot tell you that the air has the weight of a coming storm even though the percentage is low. Your knees can. The swallows can, if you have swallows. The house can, in the way it holds heat.
I am not arguing against forecasts. I am arguing for a second opinion from the actual hour. Step outside. Smell the pavement. See whether the leaves are showing their undersides. This is not folklore as decoration. It is a set of observations that kept people from being surprised by their own lives.
When the weather is bad, I try not to call it bad until I know what it is doing. Rain is bad for the picnic and good for the roots. Wind is bad for the hat and good for the seed. This is not optimism. It is accuracy. Ordinary weather is a set of trades. We live inside the trades whether we name them or not.
If you want a place to start, pick one ordinary thing: the way your street smells after the first heat, the sound of rain on the particular bin lid outside your window, the color of the sky when snow is about to try. Write it down once. You will have begun a field guide. The century will try to make every season an emergency. Keep a record of the days that were only weather. They are still the days we have.
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