If my mother didn’t get such enjoyment out of correcting other people’s grammar, she might’ve majored in meteorology instead of English.
I never realized how much my mother’s obsession with weather influenced my life until I spent this winter in Toronto. The climate there is similar to northern Ohio, where I spent the bulk of my childhood. Before we even got to Toronto, my husband and I began to have conversations like this:
“It’s gonna be cold in Canada,” he warned. He had spent January and February there while on tour with Color Purple. ”You better prepare yourself.”
“Prepare myself?” I was offended. ”I right near Canada.” (Ashtabula is across the lake from Ontario. I resisted the urge to tell him, a la Palin, that I could see Canada from my house. Which wouldn’t have been true, anyway. But almost true.) ”The weather’s practically the same.”
“It is not as cold as Canada.”
“Yes, it is. In fact, it’s worse because we get lake effect. Do you know what lake effect snow is?”
“Yes,” he replied. ”It’s when you get snow because you live near a lake.”
“Not quite. It’s when the cool winds from the north blow over the warmer waters of Lake Erie, creating major storm patterns leading to snow squalls and ice.”
I hadn’t learned that on weather.com, which, incidentally, is my computer’s home page. I learned that from my mother, who was constantly peering out the window at the clouds over Lake Erie to predict if we had enough time to get to the store and back before a storm hit. She can predict when it will hit, how long it will last, and approximately how many feet of snow we’d have on the ground from simply looking at the sky. This isn’t necessarily because she’s obsessed with weather, although she is. (She becomes particularly unbearable around 4th of July, Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends.) But reading the clouds is a major part of survival in an area termed “The Snow Belt.”
I thought everybody was raised like this. But it turns out they weren’t. Just me and my sisters, apparently. Toronto has given me the chance to show off a little.
“Dammit, it’s snowing,” my husband will say in the morning. He’s from the South and hates snow.
Quick glance out the window. ”It’ll stop.”
“The Weather Channel says it’ll snow all day.” André has begun to adopt the family habit of obsessing over weather channel.com.
“We’ll see.” I don’t like to disparage the Weather Channel. ”It definitely won’t stick, though. The ground’s too warm.”
“It’s freezing out!”
“The temperature has to be lower than 30 for at least a week for snow to stick. Probably longer in the city due to the effect of urban heat.”
“What are you talking about? “
Except for UHI, which I learned about when I moved to the City, I am simply parroting my mother. Or turning into her, however you want to look at it. But I’m okay with it. I’m glad she taught me which clouds mean snow and which clouds mean flurries. In the spring I’m happy to know the exact shade of green the sky will turn when a tornado is on its way. And in the summer I learned that a red sky at night really would mean a sailor’s delight… doesn’t everybody know that rhyme?
