The wind is whistling today. Whistling to the tune of 40 miles per hour. The leaves are blowing horizontally across the roads and a branch hit my car on the way to work. It happens to be garbage day in many communities, and on my way to work, the cars were playing dodgeball with the garbage cans that were rolling in the street. The sun is very bright, no haze at all, and the clouds are skimming by like schooners in a sailboat race.
At our house, we watch the weather channel a lot. I call it MTV for old-timers. Most people I know don't even care what the weather is, even if it is right over their heads. My mother sits and knits through tornado warnings. But, we like to know what the weather is in different parts of the country where we either have lived, or where our friends or kids are located. I imagine someday moving to Louisiana and buying a little house on the Bayou Teche, and I want to know exactly how high the humidity is. Usually it is weather that only an alligator could love, but I imagine there are airconditioners there too, just like everywhere else.
Weather in Oklahoma is usually affected by the edge of the gulf stream over head, and when you look at the map of Oklahoma, you can see the edge of one weather system or another going right across my home town of El Reno. They get everything there...lots of wind, lots of quick moving storms and dramatic temperature changes. When I moved to Boston, I lived through my first Nor'easter, and thought it was amazing that the wind would go one direction first, and then turn around and come back in from another direction. The clouds go around in huge circles. The weather in Chicago goes from West to East with no variation. In Boston, the storms circle out over the ocean and come back in again, and, round and round, can dump some serious rain.
The gusts here today are up to 50 miles per hour and I'm sporting a new "do"...something a lot more punky radical than I imagined when I fixed my hair this morning. In Chicago, when I worked at the Hancock Building, they would put up actual life lines of ropes for people to hang onto as they walked between the tall buildings. No one can imagine that until you have lived it. Chicago has really intense weather. It is seldom good. Boston is much more moderate, and...a few leaves blowing by don't bother me one bit.
So, when you have more time than you know what to do with, tune in to the weather channel and check out the big map. When you think about it MTV has nothing that beats the excitement of the gulf stream.
