Brey Willows

Card 10, Writing Down the Bones: Write about the weather.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.”

It seems like that’s a phrase I used to hear in specific places. Now I hear it all the time, in lots of locations. Like it’s a local thing. Only, it isn’t. The weather is changing everywhere, all the time, isn’t it?

My mother-in-law told me about snow, and how deep it would get. In the decades I’ve been in the UK, the snow has mostly been flurries except for an occasional storm that left enough for a snowman, though it meant leaving the grass beneath muddy and scraped through. We talk about the Beast from the East, that one storm back in 2018 that dumped an avalanche from the clouds. It sticks in the memory because of its rarity.

We went for a walk the other day, at the beginning of March, and we wore only T-shirts. It was warm (probably nearly 65/17). We marvelled at how perfect it was out there, and other walkers commented as well. “Isn’t this great?” Since then, it has dropped back into the thirties/forties/single digits. The thing with this is that it happened in January, too, and we had things sprouting. My hanging basket had lovely greenery in it.

And then the frost came and killed everything again. I don’t think it will come back.

On my little scale that’s barely a nuisance. But imagine the farmers who watch it happening across their fields? Imagine watching things sprout because it was suddenly too warm, and knowing that the frost coming the next day could be catastrophic? And then that snakes its way down the chain, and you’re left wondering why you can’t get strawberries anywhere this year as you stand scratching your head in Aldi at the empty fruit bins.

The weather used to be filler words, placeholders for not knowing what else to say. Now it leads to tales of mystifying ups and downs, tales of surviving hurricanes, tornadoes, fire seasons, droughts that don’t end. It makes for more interesting discussion, I suppose. The kind Hemingway wrote about when he said,

“All of the sadness in the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.”

Here’s hoping that the weather where you are doesn’t give you much to talk about.