It’s May 26th, Memorial Day in the US, the official opening day at local swimming pools. And the high temperature is going to be 64 degrees F (18 degrees C). It’s 54 right now. I’m freezing.
Right now I’m in the living room sitting at the computer with a blanket on. I’m going to warm my hands on the coffee — thank goodness for the coffee; it might be the only thing keeping me from hyperthermia. The cats are huddled with me for warmth. Their fur is not enough to keep them warm. It’s not enough to keep me warm.
I feel like hibernating. At least until the temps get above 70.
Today is supposed to be a stormy day, the kind of storm that comes with a side of three-inch hail and possibility of tornados. The worst of it is going to be north of us, I understand, but we are in an “enhanced” zone.
I hope the storm waits until we’re all home. This afternoon, I am at work for meetings, and I don’t want to deal with sitting in Colden Hall’s basement waiting for the all-clear. I’m CERT-trained, which means I can act in mass disasters to stabilize injuries and reduce the chaos. I hope to never use my training.
If I’m at home for the bad weather, my husband and I will go to the basement and wait for it to pass. The city has sirens, but we also have weather apps on our phones to alert us. The cats will follow us down. The basement is unfinished and cluttered, but there are chairs downstairs for us.
I hate tornado weather. I can handle severe thunderstorms, even though one took out our peach tree and a length of fence recently. I don’t like the destructive level of tornado weather. Towns get taken out by tornados, and I don’t want to be in the middle of one of them.
Two inches of snow with blizzard conditions. That’s our weather forecast for Wednesday. It’s almost calendar Spring, and we’re faced with a blizzard. Today, the high is going to be seventy-five. Tomorrow, blizzard conditions. You may wonder how we can have two inches of snow that’s a blizzard. Blizzards are all about the blowing, not the snowing. We’ve been getting some pretty fierce wind gusts lately, one of which took out a tree in our side yard.
We talk about weather here in Missouri, mostly because our weather is strange. Tornadoes in February? We’ve had them. Snowstorms in April? That too. Thundersnow? Of course. Seventy-five degrees followed by blizzard conditions? That’s the next couple of days. This is the only place I’ve seen that can simultaneously have floods and fire warnings.
I need to prep for the weather. How? Short sleeves? A snow shovel?
Today is going to be a bad weather day in Maryville, according to the weather forecast. We are at a 10% chance for bad weather, and there may even be tornadoes in the mix. Tornadoes? It’s almost November!
I guess some people call tornadoes ‘cyclones’; pretty much the same thing. A severely hazardous storm typified by a wind vortex. The standard operating procedure for a tornado is to go to the basement, for presumably the walls in the basement don’t collapse on you. There’s also less danger of being hit by flying glass. If you don’t have a basement, choose an internal room on the first floor without windows, which is often a bathroom.
I remember life before extremely accurate weather forecasting. We generally didn’t know a tornado was passing by until the tornado showed up, and then the civil defense warning would be broadcast on our tv. Then the siren would go off (this was usually the siren summoning our volunteer firefighters to an incident.)
Today, we have a fire siren in town to warn us if a tornado is imminent. But we also have our weather forecasts, our phones and the watch/warning system. We can prepare a day in advance; I know the expected time for severe storms and I can plan accordingly.
It’s interesting to look at today and reminisce about how life has changed. I guess that makes me an old person (*sigh*).
I know that talking about the weather is the smallest of small talk, the type of inoffensive speech that makes it safe to talk to total strangers. I hate small talk, preferring to talk about people’s passions, as I am passionate about mine. But look at the freaking heat index!
We’re under a heat advisory here in Northwest Missouri. The heat index (a measure of how heat and humidity get together to cause misery) is 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature without the heat index will be 98 degrees F. People die of heat stroke at these temperatures. I won’t be going out today because I take medications that make me prone to the consequences of high temperatures. (Of course, human nature being what it is, I desperately want to go to Starbucks to write.)
I think about climate change a lot when the weather gets like this. It’s not just my imagination; scientists note an increase in weather incidents like this. On average, our world is getting hotter. I think about this from the viewpoint of someone sixty years old: I remember when we didn’t worry about this. I don’t want to worry, but I am worried. How will this affect the world’s people?
As a Midwesterner (United States), I’ll be far away from the flooding and some of the extremes as they come. But how will people in poverty fare? People without air conditioning? There are ways of living, but do we still know them? Do we remember how to do them? What will we have to give up of our 21st Century values to enact them?
I wonder how life will change. I wonder if I cannot change my life enough to make any difference in the slide into turbulent weather. Thinking this as I sit in my writing spot is a lonely moment, because it’s sobering to think about a future I can’t control. To think it all goes downhill from here.
I could be wrong. We are always on the brink of great innovation. Change is always possible. Maybe someday, riches will be measured in how we relate to others. I do not feel optimistic at this moment in 98 degrees F.
We in the far northwest corner of Missouri have spent two consecutive days down in our basements (about two hours total) because of tornadic activity. We didn’t fare too bad — the tornado at Maryville did not touch down but wasn’t that far from campus, although some neighboring areas saw some damage. Northwest of us — Omaha and Lincoln — got some bad damage, as did parts of Oklahoma on day 2.
I wrote the other day about how today’s weather warnings are so much more sophisticated. The FEMA app (my favorite for severe weather) informed us throughout the afternoon and evening. This app distinguishes between “Your neighbors should be in the basement” and “YOU should be in the basement” when setting alarm noises; the latter noise is more alarming than the city’s ominous siren. What struck me was that, despite the neighborhood destruction in Omaha and Lincoln from an EF3 tornado, there were no fatalities and only non-life-threatening injuries. This speaks to me of a robust warning system and better awareness of the danger of a tornado.
The graphic at the top of this page is perhaps one of the most ingenious tools of the current emergency mitigation response. It’s a non-threatening way to describe the threat levels in a tornado. It’s funny enough to go viral. And on those severe weather days when we’re waiting for the sirens, we’re looking for taco trucks. Only we want to avoid them.
For the next couple of days, my city (town?) is in a severe weather zone. The Weather Channel says, “There is a likely risk of severe weather today. Wind, tornadoes and hail are possible. Look out for large hail and powerful tornadoes. Have a plan and be prepared.”. This risk continues through tomorrow; the National Weather Service has given a Hazardous Weather Outlook (pre-Watches and Warnings) to our area.
Our house has weather radio and our phones have weather programs with warnings. Our basement has bottled water and emergency kits. We remember the tornadoes in Utica, IL and Joplin, MO (home town-adjacent areas for each of us) and take severe weather seriously.
Weather awareness has changed significantly since I was young, and I was in one of the few areas with any form of local weather response. When I was young, most people got their television through antennas, and so network TV carried tornado watches and warnings. I don’t believe stations posted severe thunderstorm watches or warnings back then. Our middle-of-nowhere town was in the Chicago market, yet 90 miles away, so we watched warnings in which we may have been obliquely mentioned. However, because there was no way we could receive TV waves in a river valley, we had cable TV in LaSalle County, IL, which was novel 55 years ago. This was important to the current discussion because we had our own emergency warnings.
At the time, FEMA didn’t exist; the national civil defense organization was named Civil Defense. Our Civil Defense person was Bill Bailey, who I believe was the Sheriff. And he delighted in Civil Defense. When a tornado watch or warning occurred, he cut into our regularly scheduled programming with emergency tones. He then droned on about the warning of the moment. Originally, the screen would go back, but I think later interruptions had this symbol:
We would all go to our basements like good little Midwesterners. Ok, I kid. I would go to the basement, as would my mother. My sister and dad went out to the front porch to watch for tornadoes. I was scared to death of tornadoes back then (and many other things as well, but not spiders or snakes or bees or wasps).
Nowadays, we have a much better warning system. We have warnings about weather days in advance from the National Weather Service. We have FEMA with not only warnings, but sophisticated operations in the aftermath of severe weather. But I remember when all we had in LaSalle County, IL, was Bill Bailey.
We’re moving into the grey time, where the holiday red and green and tinsel are a memory, the white snow is muddied, and the new year is weeks old. The sun hasn’t shown itself in weeks and the days are still too short. Now is the time I want to hibernate until I start smelling the grass begin to perk up.
In an agrarian world, everyone would be resting this time of year, storing up for the busy three seasons (I think. I am not an anthropologist.) But this is not my world. I go to work and teach my classes, then (as in today) go to the brightly-lit Starbucks and work on writing.
Coffee helps my mood, as does accomplishment. And I give myself credit for every little accomplishment to boost myself. “Yay! I got up! Hurrah! I wrote 300 words! Yippee! I cleaned the toilet!”
I will persevere. If I get too depressed, I know to talk to my doctor. But: “Yay! I’m going to class!”
Today we finally have a Winter day — three inches of snow on the ground and 31 degrees, so we’ll have the snow through tomorrow. That’s been the status of our snow. Barely enough to cover the ground, barely long enough to call a snow cover. No snow days in my future.
All our snow, strangely, gets forwarded to Kirksville, some 150 miles away. Or malingers just north of Omaha. We keep acting as if the big one is coming in any minute, but then we get barely enough to cover the ground. One doesn’t even have to shovel it, just look cross-eyed at the sidewalk.
Oh, do I long for the eight inches of snow weekly I got back in Oneonta! Now that was Winter! We still didn’t have snow days because New Yorkers are hardy! (They’re also talented complainers, at least the downstate variety are.) To be honest, it was a pain in the ass parking up the side of a hill with an inch of ice at the curb. But it was a camaraderie, hoping our cars were still there when we left the party.
So I’m going to look out the window watching the snow slowly melt. By tomorrow, we will have marshy ground again and it will freeze when we have no snow on the ground. And so it will cycle till Spring, which will come with a sudden fluffy snowstorm just to irk us here in Maryville.
Every year, my husband and I hold our Christmas rituals dear. Decking the living room with lit garlands, decking the porch as well, setting out the creche that I grew up with, playing Christmas songs, editing the next Christmas romance, watching Christmas movies, turning on the Christmas tree.1
It hasn’t snowed appreciably here in northwest Missouri, and this means we haven’t celebrated one of our yearly rituals. For 35 years (give or take a few), I have celebrated the first snow. There has been no snow this year, and no snow in the forseeable forecast.
Whether alone or with friends, I have performed the ritual of First Snow:
Wait till at least one inch of fresh snow has fallen and it’s night out
Gather a bowl full of snow (or, alternatively, sit out in the snow)2
Grab a cup of preferred beverage3
Drink toasts to various things as your imagination grabs you4
Pass the cup around (pre-COVID)5
Always begin and end with “To the Snow”
When done, dump the last bit of the cup into the snow
First Snow, by its climatological nature, is impromptu. Generally, there’s not more than a few hours of warning. This has meant that anywhere from one (myself) to eight (friends) have met up for it.
But, as far as I know, it’s not happening this year according to the weather forecast. I guess I will have to enjoy my green Christmas
**************************
The Christmas tree hides in the parlor. We literally just turn the lights on in the Christmas season. During the worst of COVID, we turned the lights back on all summer.
When I was younger, I sat out in the snow. Not anymore.
This beverage has ranged from blackberry brandy drunk out of a mug in a city park to hot chocolate with brandy on my balcony to plain hot chocolate in my living room.
The later in the round of toasts it is, the stranger and funnier the toasts grow. Especially if the contents of the cup are high-proof. For examples of toasts, click here.
Words Like Me 