I live in northern Ohio, which for some reason isn't known for its great weather. In fact, we have great weather for, well, most of the year. For instance, today it's sunny and breezy, 75 degrees, and I'm sitting on the side porch drinking iced tea and I can't think of too many places where the weather is better than this.
We don't get credit for that.
When friends and family move away to what they consider to be a better climate, they tend to monitor the weather back here. Then, during one of our especially nasty winter storms in January, they call up and say, "Hey! How's the weather there? I hear it's really awful." Even though I don't ask, they say, "It's 80 degrees here, gonna play a little tennis later on. So glad I don't have to go out and shovel! HaHa, loser." Well, maybe they don't say "loser," but that's what I hear.
I've found there's no winning this weather game. Even when the weather is bad there, it's better than here.
When it's 115 degrees there, you say, "It's a dry heat."
When it's 25 below, you say, "At least it's sunny."
When a blizzard blows in out of the Rockies, you say, "It never lasts very long around here."
I guess I have some options. In mid summer, I could call up and say, "Hey, I hear your whole state is charred to a crisp! It's really green here, just brought in another armload of flowers. Well, I'll let you go, you better go out and swat some sparks and hose down the outbuildings again." Or during the hurricane, I could call and say, "How's the weather? I heard you were having some trouble. What? I can't hear you, sounds like it's blowing up a storm. Yeah, it's pretty calm here. Still got our siding and everything."
Or I could email a link to this great new tarantula and scorpion repellant I came across. Thought you could use this. Us? Yeah, here we had a bit of an ant problem in the spring. Nothing like YOUR ants, a course.
But I wasn't raised that way.
In different parts of the country, there are differing definitions of “bad weather,” depending on whether they actually have any. I mean, everybody likes to talk about the weather, right? Some of us just have more to talk about.
Where I come from, it’s not bad weather unless we can shovel it. Or unless trees are coming down around our ears. We take pride in our bad weather, the summer and winter storms that roll in off the Great Lakes. “Yep, I remember the blizzard of ’78. It was so cold we had to wrap up in snowdrifts to keep warm. It was so windy, the barn blew inside out and we had to staple the cows to the roof.”
California may have its Santa Anas and the Mediterranean its Mistrals and Sciroccos, but here on the North Coast we have the witch of November—the gales that sink ships on the Great Lakes.
In some parts of the country, if you predict “sunny and hot” you’ll be right ninety per cent of the time. Where I live, weather is a big deal. We treat our meteorologists like shamans (shamen?) and hang on their every word. Sometimes they are woefully wrong, but we forgive them. Predicting the weather around here is hard.
In the midwest, we’re good at coping with bad weather. The birth rate always skyrockets nine months after a big snowstorm or a power outage. I’m just sayin’.
My husband and I went on our first date during the Great Fourth of July storm of 1968. Um. We were—um—in preschool. The fireworks were called off, the trees came down, we went back to the house, and a great romance was kindled that still burns today.
A couple of years ago I was in LA for the SCBWI Summer conference. The conference buzzed about the bad weather. It was raining.
“Maybe you’d better leave for the airport early,” people said, in the hushed, excited tones we reserve for the hundred-year storm. “There’s no telling what the traffic will be like.”
I was in San Antonio, Tx, last February, at a time that Mother Nature was relentlessly dumping snow on the Midwest. People in SA were apologizing for the weather. It was…cloudy.
‘We don’t usually get clouds this time of year,’ they said, looking skyward and rubbing their chins. ‘Sorry ‘bout that.’
By whatever the local definition, bad weather seems to occur wherever I am. I’m in San Francisco in a downpour, and folks are saying, Huh! It never rains this time of year.
So right now I’m in Albuquerque, N.M. and the sun is baking the adobe and the hollyhocks are in bloom and people are remarking on the high humidity.
“Humidity!” I say. “You’ve never seen humidity until you’re out in a southern Illinois cornfield on the Fourth of July.”
They blink at me. “Well,” they say, desperately, “it’s been pretty windy lately, too. And dusty. You should’ve been here last week.”
