Every Day Rain

A foggy, rainy December morning at Green Lake

Weather Report
by David Budbill, from We’ve Still Got Feet

The weather is horrible here on Judevine Mountain.
It’s dark and cold all winter.  Every day rain and snow

beat on your head.  And the sun never shines.  Then
it’s spring and more rain and ice and mud, too.  And

after that, the blackflies eat you alive and then the
deerflies and then the mosquitoes and then it’s fall

before you ever noticed it was summer.  Then there
might be a couple of weeks of decent weather and

then it starts to rain and snow again.  It’s just awful
living here.  I don’t think you’d like it here at all.

You better go find your own miserable place to live.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a farmer’s daughter, or if it’s because I was raised in Minnesota, but talking about the weather is a normal part of my day.  (Here’s a video clip about “How to Talk Minnesotan” on YouTube.)  We are in the darkest days of the year, so it can be  a challenge to find something positive to say.   Winter in Seattle is almost invariably rainy and gray, cold, but not freezing (most of the time).  It’s true that if you waited for good weather to do some planned task, you’d never get anything done.

And if not the weather, it’s something else.  This is life.

“There are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worthy of talking about, and one of them is the weather.”
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek