Let's Just Talk About The Weather

Please?

It’s been really hot here.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the unusual heat we’re having in Europe, and the drought that’s led to large wildfires across Spain, Portugal, and France.

Here in the Ardennes it’s been a bit difficult. For more than a few weeks the weather’s been quite different from what’s normally been, shifting the birthing patterns of insects and the growing season of plants. We have fewer biting flies and fewer mosquitos, but I’m swarmed with wasps whenever I venture out into the heat of my yard. It’s worse elsewhere, though—in the city where my husband works as Cultural Director, the problem’s even worse and feels like a plague.

Last year at this time, we were dealing with 1000-year floods, and my overly optimistic attempt to grow tomatoes and hot peppers, even under a small greenhouse, resulted in some really tragic blackened stalks. This year, on the other hand, all my cilantro, spinach, radishes, and fennel bolted before summer even came and I’d be drowning in tomatoes if I’d tried again this year.

That is, assuming it doesn’t all suddenly change again.

The heat is awful, and so is the drought, but what’s really hard is the total unpredictability of it all. For people who haven’t lived in villages with centuries or even millennia of history, or for those who’ve never been around farming, the idea that such things are ever predictable might seem strange. The relationship between the land and those who live in cities is abstract, conveyed over food price signals rather than the early or retarded growth of plants around them. The effects of a bad grain harvest due to flooding or a bumper crop of fruit due to extra heat slowly makes it way through consumer networks, a few cents more here, a few cents less there, too subtle for most ever to notice. And of course industrial agriculture tries its best to flatten the effects of extreme weather in either direction, as it also does for the leeching out of nutrients from soil by constantly injecting chemical fertilizers like painkillers into an otherwise untreated sick patient.

Today, though, the heat broke for a little while, and along with that break came rain. I felt the first drops of it fall upon me as I left the gym and mounted my bike, still soaked with sweat. It keep promising but held out until I finally arrived home, opened up the blinds in our house for the first time in weeks, and stood outside to feel its soft torrent.

It’s hard to write in the heat, or really to do much at all. Now that it’s dissipated for a little while, I feel more alive, just as I imagine the grass in the pastures beyond our hedge feels. The cows certainly looked more alive as the rain started, fleeing perhaps only through habit under the branches of massive oaks and then venturing quickly back out into the downpour just to feel its caress.

In the moment of that shift, the moment between the fading heat and dryness and the coming moist coolness, I shook my head remembering a strange thing I was taught as a youth. “Only simple people talk about the weather.”

I don’t know where I first heard it, nor who said it, but I’ve heard it again and again and I think you have too. The weather is supposed to be one of those inane topics, the sort of thing you turn to when there’s nothing meaningful to say. Old people talk about the weather a lot, whereas everyone else—at least those with big ideas and thirst for life—supposedly have much better things to say.

I feel a fool for ever believing this, just as I once thought those who gave attention to the phase of the moon or what foods were in season were somehow simple and stupid. All this was a product of living too much of my adult life in cities, each of which have their own ideas of what is fashionable to think about.

Speaking of the weather is speaking of emotions and the body. When a neighbor tells me it is warm and sunny, he’s not doing so because he thinks I cannot figure this out on my own. He speaks it because he feels it, and he is asking me to join him in that feeling. My mother-in-law and I speak about the weather all the time, and how she describes it and how I describe it conveys more about our inner lives and our affection for each other than a thousand words ever could. We smiled at each other outside when the rain began today, both sighing in relief together as if embraced and held tight by that rain.

It isn’t just that the weather affects us, but rather that the weather flows through us. The weather is air and water, warm or cold, moving about the world, into our lungs and back out. Here in Luxembourg, the government lowered the speed limit on major highways because they know how heat flows in and out of people. It makes them groggy, aggressive, slow-witted, and irritable: they drive like the weather itself, and thus they kill each other just like extreme heat kills us. Ice in the winter is a “hazard,” but it is also a state in the mind: hard and impermeable and uneasily stopped when it’s taken off too fast in one direction.

We already know this, all of us. Recall the happiest days of your life, your most joyous memories, and you’ll immediately remember what the weather felt like. Everyone remembers the weather on their wedding day, or the day they fell in love, or the day of their child’s birth. It is the same for harder and sorrowful days. It’s not just because those were memorable times, or even only because we are most body at those times, but because the weather was also there at those moments as a guest and a witness.

So please, let’s talk about the weather. Tell me of the weather where you are, which is telling me how you feel. Or tell me of a memory of joy, and what the weather said to you in that happyness.