I was raised well beyond the chance for flurries and blizzards, in the depths of the hell that is the hot valley east of Los Angeles. Thus, my education in weather was limited to mysterious words and terms that had no real meaning to me – smog, visibility index, heat inversion. It wasn’t until we moved to Arizona that my real education in weather began, at the desk of many a flight instructor as I worked towards a degree as a professional pilot (a degree which I never did finish, but that is a story for another time).
The weather in Arizona was so unlike the weather in Los Angeles that I often found myself watching it just because I could. Weather in LA simply arrives through the smog and haze. In the mountains of Arizona we would watch the thunderstorms move in, towers of roiling power that evinced the shape of massive sailing ships gliding slowly but inexorably towards us from the desert in the lowlands below us. It was there I learned that clouds were not white but were in fact made of every color of the rainbow. The reds and oranges of a broken overcast would give way to the steel blue and putrid green of a good supercell about to dump it’s fury on us. I learned the static feeling in the air and the pressure on your chest that signals that it’s time to stop watching the storm like a fool and get inside under shelter before the hail falls.
But now that we are settled here in Spokane I have learned yet another form of weather. Today we woke to find a couple inches of fresh snow had fallen in the night. It wasn’t quite three inches, but it was enough to create that silent hush that I love so much in the early morning. During the day, the sun nearly peeked through the clouds, though with our 20 degree temperatures it would not have done much good. I cleared the sidewalks and went inside to await the real storm.
I type this while an honest-to-God blizzard blows outside my office window. I have known this was coming all day, as did everyone else on the block. It seems that no matter how many winters pass in this place, none of us seems to be truly ready when it finally decides to shove autumn out of the way. True, it’s two weeks earlier than usual this year, but that is hardly an excuse. We all scurried like squirrels burying our nuts before the frost, only our nuts were garden hoses and rakes and shovels, not to mention a few potted plants.
All day I could sense the storm building, but in an entirely different way than either LA or Arizona. It came in insidious degrees, minute changes over the whole day that added up over time to something you could taste, something you could feel, but at such a slow rate that any one change was too small to notice. Even the dogs and the chickens felt it. The chickens never came outside today, preferring to huddle on their roost and drink the warm water I gave them now and then. The dogs, rambunctious this morning in the delight at the fresh snow, slowly quieted down and settled, until by this afternoon they no longer sought to go out. They are not huddled together on their bed by the heater, noses to tails, snoring in their lassitude.
The whole world outside seemed to inhale slowly all day, taking a deep breath before we plunge into the storm. Now that the storm is here, that breath is still held, waiting for the rude splash of nature’s fury on our faces. It won’t be expelled until the sun breaks through tomorrow.
I wait to exhale myself.
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