Perhaps it is that we are getting old. We’re becoming our parents/guardians/caregivers who said “Kidsthesedays” were such-n-such and the country was so-n-so and all was going to Hellnahandbasket – which considering hand baskets were, what, from 1880, the expression itself was worn thin and aged to some cliché where we could all agree I think that thing you say that you mean is not what you think it means. Didn’t we all promise one another, so long ago, we broke a wishbone under the bushes, that one passage that made it seem like a protected fort we kids met up after school and we said we’d never turn into them, never sound like those adults.
And now we do. Things have changed. Maybe the kid’s music is OK, the country is not worse then when we were five, and there is still hope for the theater and it is not yet dead, or as dead as we now claim.
Bethatasitmay, there is one thing of which I am certain that is no longer the way I remember it, as a kid or even ten years ago, and that is the weather. The weather has totally changed on us. Rabid dog summers, malarial winters, springs and autumns that side with winter or summer burning too hot or cold and not allowing us that transition time in order to change wardrobes, colours, and the dial on our thermostat. Now, this author is not a scientist, a weather personality, or a meteorologist, but I do remember in those days before we named every low pressure center and that while there were weather events, these happened infrequently enough to become big news. Now the 40 tornadoes or the floods or the forest fires are just part of the nightly news, not the entirety. I remember the blizzard of 1976 when the snow was four feet deep and I was about three feet tall. For decades we talked about that event. I remember hurricanes. Distinct and compact events. I remember the Halloween blizzard. And there were a few others here and there. However, it seemed that storms deserving of remembering came along once in a while. Now they seem to come every weekend. We had Super Storm Sandy just months it seemed after Irene. The Iowa river flood, is that still going on or did we all get bored with it. Just last summer in Fort Mudge the river crested twice, and this was just the New Normal rain storms.
As I sit and compose these thoughts I am at the beach on the East Coast. Outside there is a hurricane. A small cute one. His name is Authur. I guess we will have a longer than usual hurricane season, or perhaps not, since nothing seems to fit the old patterns and for all I know we’ll get a drought or snow in July – finally having that Christmas in July we have always wanted. Nothing fits into the old patterns that I remember as a kid. This spring in the North East up in the Lost Kingdom was unusually cold. It was for a time warm in early April but then the chill returned and the remainder of the month and all of May was chilly. The cool ground did not allow for our garden to truly come to life since the ground temperature needs to be at a certain level and those nights dipped back into the 40s and low 50s just didn’t allow this to happen. I was asked over the winter, one of the worst we’ve had in five years, what I thought about the coming season and I must admit, I called it. A cool spring followed by a cool summer with lots of rain and the occasional blast of hot, sticky, wet weather. And, it seems for the most part to be on track to provide yet another summer where the water is too cold to swim and the air too hot and moist to breathe.
Arthur passed without much of a fuss at this ancient sea side village. The ocean crashed that much more, the wind blew and the rain crackled past turning the trees upside-down. However, nothing seemed over disturbed upon the passing of the storm. This weather event seems tame for a hurricane but was strange since just the other day we had torrential rain gathered from the blackest of clouds…
And this was not our first set of downpours. Just the other week in Fort Mudge a storm came through and in two hours six inches of rain came out of the sky and a lightening bolt had exploded a steeple of one of the older churches on the main street.
Disasters seem certain ahead of us, or that what had passed for a terrible storm a decade ago is now seen as a typical passing shower.
I don’t need a weatherman to tell me which way the wind is blowing….