Weather you Like it or Not

When I report that the four straight days of clouds, rain, and unseasonably cold temperatures has lifted and I woke up to sunshine this morning... you get it. You can hear the smile in my writing. When I read the Facebook blurbs from my friends: "Snow again in MAY!" and "cracked out the rain boots" and "baseball probably canceled for the third time again tonight" I get it too. Weather has such a huge impacton our lives, and I think sometimes we write it off when a conversation starts there.

"It's so surface. All he does is talk about the weather," I can hear you complaining.

And I know, there are people like that. Maybe there is more being said than we hear. I am starting to understand the big joke about the old couple sitting on the porch talking about yesterday's weather, looking at the skies and doing their best to predict how the day's weather is going to go.

Why do we talk about the weather so much? Well, first of all, I think it is the safest common ground for all of us. Or rather, common sky. It is one of the life forces over which we have no control, and we experience the changes in weather in much the same way as the person next to us. Maybe the old people on the porch only need the weather to propel their conversations and their relationships. Maybe they know that, because they have lived through enough weather patterns and storms, that the weather reports say enough.

For the rest of the weather report...