(This appeared one Sunday morning in 2006 as one of my weekly newspaper columns. And since this morning fourteen years later we are expecting the arrival of the first arctic front of the year after a broiling surface of the sun summer I thought it might be appropriate to pull it out of the vault and dust it off. The norther that will roll in tonight won’t be as fierce as the one back then, but it will still be, for easily impressed souls like me, a wonder to behold)
* * *
As I write this, a monster norther is tumbling its way down the continent from the arctic.
It’s early in the morning, way before daylight, on the last day of November. The other living things in this house – one wife and four cats – are fast asleep and the only sounds in the place are the tapping I’m doing on my keyboard and the ticking of the little clock on the desk in my study.
Outside my windows it is dark and humid and still. And that big cold front is making its way toward all of us – house and wife and cats and yours truly – as surely as a fast train on a beeline for a depot.
I’m a weather junkie. I’ll confess that right up front. There’s not much more impressive and beautiful, to me, than a wide, gunmetal gray sky full of a dark and brooding thunderstorm. The low clouds so full of their cargo that it seems impossible that they can stay aloft, the air rich with the heady promise of rain.
And a windy day – a real Winnie the Pooh blustery day – calls me out into it every time. A day when trees dance briskly in a stiff headwind and fields of tall grass roll and sway like the choppy surface of an agitated lake. A day like that is perfection personified. It is, as C. S. Lewis once said, red meat and strong beer.
This fascination with meteorological events has worked its way into all of my books. My memoir about my father and his Alzheimer’s experience commences in Oakwood, the little town we lived in, covered in snow one Christmas Eve Eve a long time ago. Then I set an historical novel in the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Three books later – each of them sprinkled liberally with rain, wind, or snow – I started my latest yarn with a little boy waiting for the first blue norther of the season with his old grandfather during World War II. The two of them go out into the yard to meet it, reach up and touch it, and even imagine they can smell what it brings with it: scents of pine and fir from the Dakotas, and sweet corn and musty wheat from Kansas.
I called that novel Touching Winter. And that’s what I intend to do later this morning, when that big fellow finally gets here.
It hit Dallas late yesterday afternoon, and my sister Janie sat on her patio and gave me a play-by-play account of its arrival over her cell phone: the dark sky, her wind chimes playing a lively tune and leaves scurrying. Then the sudden plunge into the deep freezer. Finally she was quiet for a moment, before summing the whole experience up with a pair of soft words: “It’s amazing.”
Now, some people might conclude that my sister is as crazy as I am. But I like to think that we’re – along with my wife, who is also a weather junkie – just a little better off than people who can’t manage to see turbulent weather as anything more than an inconvenience.
I intend to go outside later this morning and put the palm of my hand right up against that arctic freight train as it arrives. I’ll take my Creative Writing III class out there with me if it happens during our time together. Because I couldn’t come up with a better lesson for people wanting to be writers than to put them in the presence of something bigger than all of us. Something so compelling that, try as mankind might, we can’t stop it. Or even slow it down. All we can do when facing something like that is either get out of its way or stand in awe of it.
Everything comes at a cost, of course, and society can fall out of balance as quickly as nature does. Lots of unfortunate folks will have to scramble for shelter tonight. And my heart goes out to them.
But, this early morning, as November slips into December, and as a strong norther bears heavily down, I’m looking forward to its arrival. To its looming appearance on the northern horizon as it announces, with confident authority and a smidgen of attitude, that things will change now.
It’s comforting to know – in a world that is usually altogether too confusing and hectic – that there are some things that I’m not expected to have any control over whatsoever. That’s probably why I love the weather so much.
Today’s paper just plopped into the yard outside my windows. Earl Gray the cat has appeared, yawning, by my chair. A hundred or so miles to the north, a massive giant is galloping in this direction.
And I can’t wait.
© 2006 Ron Rozelle
Ron Rozelle Wordsmith 