Talk About the Weather

Hi Neighbor! Have you seen my trashcan?

This was what I was waiting for. No wind. Somewhere above 60. The sun, clearly visible, sinking in the west. A couple of hot air balloons are rising above downtown Rochester, which I can see from my living room windows. Even more enjoyably, from my deck, where I’ve set up shop with my laptop.

The air is still enough to hear every bird in the hood. Robins, chickadees, house finches, white-throated sparrows, red-bellied woodpeckers, male cardinals trying desperately at this point to find a wife, blue jays screaming at them all, telling them “HEY, LOOK UP! LOOK AT THE SKY!” They, too, are excited to see the sun.

I can hear a Boomer blasting Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” from his man cave in a garage, door wide open. A high schooler practices her violin. A neighboring mom yelling out the back door, “Ellory! Say good-bye to your friends. It’s time for dinner.” A Harley making a guttural pass on Highway 52.

Two months I’ve been waiting for this. A very cold, windy, rainy, miserable two months, weatherwise.

In deciding to move back to the Midwest, I was under no illusions about how harsh the winter weather could be. I’ve been here before, after all. I spent a year in Minneapolis clerking for a judge 22 years ago and experienced first-hand the bitter bite of winter. I grew up in northern Iowa, bearing down against head winds while biking to or from the pool or running to my car in the high school parking lot. But I had forgotten how winter can hang around like a guest overstaying a welcome.

It's May 4th, and the trees in my yard and neighborhood (and all of southern Minnesota, for that matter) have yet to blossom or leaf out. Crocus, daffodils, and scilla are just starting to poke up. Everything is at least a month behind. This is the first day since moving here two months ago, it seems, that the wind hasn’t blown my hair and my mood sideways.

April made me question my judgment with this move. It was windy all the time. Like, a baseline of 15-20 mph winds every day, with frequent gusts up to 40 or more. Plus rain mixed with sleet and snow. And hail. My commutes to and from work on I-90 every day were white-knuckled adventures. The night of April 14th I was glued to all the local channels that had preempted regular programming to track severe storms plowing through northern Iowa and into Minnesota. The red box of tornado warnings on the meteorologists’ Doppler radars kept being redrawn, tracking their way toward Austin and Rochester. One skirted just south of Algona, my hometown where my mom still lives. I texted her, “are you watching this?” She responded, unfazed in the way only a Midwesterner can be, “Yes, just rain and hail. Watching the Twins.” Tornados touched down near Mason City and later wiped out the tiny town of Taopi, Minnesota, just north of the Iowa border. Two Hormel employees who live there lost their homes.

An E3 tornado did some major damage to Algona in 1979, the summer between third and fourth grade for me. It wiped out an elementary school (not mine, though mine was being torn down and rebuilt anyway), 104 homes and 20 or so businesses, including the Kmart. Two people died.

I have a friend who watched his home rip away from its foundation while he cowered in the basement. His family fled the Midwest soon thereafter. He’s still traumatized to this day and can’t even talk about tornados. I grew up a couple miles south of town and the twister’s path and suffered only indirect impacts. Because my elementary school and the one hit by the tornado were both under construction at the same time, the town converted a leaky, flimsy sheet-metal warehouse with no basement into a makeshift school for students from both. My classmates shared scary stories from that frightful night, and many would exhibit true panic every time the school had a tornado drill. As a result, I have both a fascination and fear of tornados. The destruction they wreak is awesome in the truest sense of the word. So on April 14th, I anxiously flipped among the three local TV stations awaiting news of a touchdown and wondering whether Rochester’s sirens would be triggered. Luckily, Rochester stayed out of the path.

But it didn’t escape the month’s steady high winds. Constant wind is the Chinese water torture of weather. It is a contributing factor to an infliction called prairie madness, which drove many pioneers to quit their new lives on the treeless plains and move back east, or worse, to commit suicide. Those who stayed evolved into hearty stock. This trait has been passed down through the generations to today’s surviving Midwestern souls. April made me think my DNA was missing this gene. At the very least, 25 years in Colorado, which experiences more than 300 days of sunshine and mostly mild temps, has shaved the stoic calluses from my constitution.

Fellow Minnesotans tell me, though, that I’m not the only one to be driven mad this past month. April was particularly bad, and the weather has been driving them crazy, too. There’s empirical evidence to support our collective misery. April 2022 was one of the windiest on record with an average daily wind speed above 16 mph. That’s 2 mph more than the historical average. It was also one of the wettest months in a long time. And cloudy. And cold. We’re all sick of it.

Which is why a day like this one is everything around here. It rekindles faith and hope and belief that good things will come and balance will be restored. It is not taken for granted. When the temps creep above 60, the sun comes out, and the wind screeches to a halt, Midwesterners act like Hawaii came to visit. We haul up summer clothes from the basement, don shorts and flip flops, and fire up the grills. We sift through junk drawers looking for sunglasses. Dogs finally get the extra long walks they were promised. Everyone rushes outside to gawk at the rare jewel of a day.

After all, we paid a premium for it.