Weather exile, nay exhilaration
Fog (Sun eve) my first official note of fog amid bewilderment as to whether in actual fact I merely need new glasses.
Fog – rain – rain – wind (bit) – immense over cast grey bulge — rain – rain – rain.
This morning it’s confirmed a La Nina Winter Forecast for us this winter. What this means will become apparent as I continue “past-casting”.
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In Murakami weather moments I can report a degree of exhilaration running with water dripping off my sleeves and nose and eyelashes. I passed a completely bereft park and laughed out loud at how ridiculous running in pouring rain is.
But I admired the 8 people out strolling under umbrellas yesterday.
I’ve concluded the most accurate barometer on the weather is to go out each evening and run in it.
Thus yesterday I can report the first real chill to the knuckles declared. Only spotted rain mind joined the chill.
I had to cave in and turn the heat on and fill the hot water bottles.
It’s great soup making weather. The Potrebenko grown bay leaves are diminishing.
We had these past days a blustery weather event, with 2 wind warnings. I have never seen the title Wind Warning 2 on a wind warning so must try to figure out if it’s a higher class of wind warning. I was so consumed paying attention to the said bluster and drenching that I have little to report. This is the problem with past-casting rather than forecasting. What I am actually interested in capturing would be “right-in-the-middle” of it descriptions. But working life and feeding the chickens prevails over such indulgences.
The colour of the day during the storms was fascinating. Above the wallpaper paste pulpy usual, but yesterday my small male was unwell so I dispatched to fetch him various medicaments and during my journey was quite overcome by the beauty to be found in the moodiness that the weather was creating. There’s a fresh aroma that comes from those storms that reminds me so much of the West of Ireland, where the wind maintains a permanent rhapsody approx 11.5 months of the year. I am often astonished at the predicted wind speeds the forecast shows for the region my mother lives in and how her house remains upright. Thank Christ for stone, I suppose.
The rest of the West Coast world audaciously announced yesterday as the last day of summer, whereas here at Literature et Folie the Autumn season is already four days underway.
A CBC report (what-do-they-know-wha?) declared the summer passed a “bummer summer”. What a ludicrous assertion, on what basis? On the basis of assumption. The assumption of what summer must be. It was certainly not a “bummer summer” rather it was a moody summer season with pronounced independent thinking and bouts of non conformity and an impressive last minute “up do”. The only mildly inconvenient aspect of it was the late start to the growing season, but my garden was suffering from drowning by peat so I think my peat flooding was more of a problem than the lack of sun.
I have to check the winter forecasts, the last time I looked they were predicting colder than normal temperatures for the Wesssst and warmer than normal elsewhere.
I am heartened by the arrival of our atmospheric rains. They are so temperate thus far. I am awaiting the first fog eagerly.
Saturday morning treat: Weather symbols of Japan.
My favourite is fog
Heavy thunderstorm has a solid charm about it too
I was fortunate this evening to enjoy a walk home from gymnastics. The baseball match was on at the stadium so I took a lift up with my males who attended the match with Gpa. It was such a lovely evening, darker than I expected, as Autumn (fall) approaches. I knitted, while I walked which is something I love to do from time to time.
My shawl or cardigan, whichever it turns out to be, is a rainbow wool that is growing and becoming heavy on the needles.
As I wandered home knitting, I was thinking about the thunderstorms forecast on the other side of the country. The night was so still here.
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Beckett’s letters have succeeded in doing what nine yoga classes failed to do for me. I read them mainly to discover what books he was reading and to read about his walks. He was a great man for walking.
Jack Layton
Death is such a blinder. It’s why I wrote the novel I did. Jack, Our Man, has died at 61.
Outside it’s a soaker of a day, grey and depleting. The weather pitch perfect in grief.
The PM, far from a poet, offers a limp remembrance, the people will out-articulate him on this, as they have so much else (except yet at the ballot box)
Politically it’s such a depressing time in this country, that Jack Layton’s death is like losing the goal keeper. Perhaps all deaths are like this. This being a more collectively felt one.
Nothing quite so reliable as the insomniac’s weather report!
At 1.07am if you were in the land of slumber I am pleased to report for you it was raining. And a most excellent rain it was too, coming as it did after the 27 degree scorcher of a day. (The employment of the gerund in this sentence is an absolute disservice to the quality and verve of the rain, but the insomniac weather report cannot focus on guitar solo grammar and must remain attentive instead to the finery of nabbing what you are sensibly missing by being asleep).
This is a fresh camping rain without the pain and discomfort of needing to go camping. This rain possesses a sense of contentment rather than entitlement… (the insomniac’s weather report is permitted to give the weather human qualities, since slumbering humans are not awake to dispute it).
A rain of convenience and I repeat finery. A fresh cross breeze included. The kind of breeze a random doorway smoker could absolutely destroy if they stood beneath your window.
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I have been blessed yet again by tripping over literary treasure. This time a 12 cent copy of a book called Lifetime by Scott Sommer. It is sharp, short fiction. No one I’ve asked remembers him. (But those I’ve asked do not live in Brooklyn where perhaps he’s v well remembered) He died of a heart attack at 42. This book was published in (well it lists several dates so am thinking it must be a third printing, the dates offered are 78, 81 and 86. Sommer was a writer who certainly embraced new ways of cutting up his sandwiches. The form of these stories is lively and innovative.
At the risk of creating uproar I have been enjoying the weather that has the city so sunken in the glooms. There are several reasons for this, firstly everyone is discussing it and noticing it and I’m a firm advocate for paying attention to the weather. (& mortality, unfortunately no one is discussing that) There’s plenty to notice about it.
I’ve observed that the rain, being the intermittent variety, means it’s perfectly feasible to work in the garden and have managed to do some excavating of my booming strawberry patch. However, I’ve also been engaged in the close scrutiny and spying and entrapment by my two not so fat fingers of the burgeoning slug increase. Ha! I’m onto these fellas finally. I’m getting crafty with them and scooping them out to a salty finale.
Second reason I’ve been enjoying the weather is how it reminds me of November and winter. I also appreciate the audacity of it that it will do what it wishes and that the population demands what has come before, what they know to be summer and for the latter few days it’s on its own drive and direction.
The third reason I’ve been enjoying it is the terrible news stories that are being written around it that contain the most unimaginative language and invocations. It’s a firm reminder that the weather is linguistically unchartered territory except for the brief literature we have and Gerry Gilbert’s weathery poems come to mind. I must resurrect the literary weather forecasts and make some more.
The weather has in fact been good clothes drying weather if you are attempting to dry them on an apartment balcony. Friday was a faceful of fresh blustery wind that reminded me of the most blustery spot on the planet, which I am deeply familiar with. But if you can isolate these single elements within the weather system it will enhance your neurological weather noticing and then when those very blue skies come, which they have done this summer, well ditto you notice them.