Powered By Blogger

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Why Watch Weather?

Trout Lilies

I'm a weather junkie. Unfortunately, we're in the streaming world now, and I've lost contact with my favorite zone-out fix, The Weather Channel. I must not be the only one so afflicted, though, because Weather Channel has had a long and successful run on TV and has become a go-to in apps and on the net.

I had the thought the other day, that while there are a lot of weather watchers today, most folks, most of the time in their American indoor lives, are barely affected by weather conditions at all. They just turn up the heat when they are cold and turn on the a/c when they are hot and don't particularly worry about it. If the apple blossoms are frozen here, they'll just ship our apples in from somewhere else.

Now, I've lived in hot places without a/c, and that wasn't much fun, especially as the place where I endured this was both noisy and hot. You couldn't open a window to catch a pleasant breeze for fear of being deafened, or, at least, of drowning out the TV you'd turned to full volume in an attempt to ignore the racket outside. During those summers you better believe I paid close attention to the forecast.

If you consider it, as long as you aren't living in a Third World mud hovel and earning your daily bread by farming, weather doesn't seem much to worry about. Many Americans go from homes to garages to cars to garages and then jobs and never have to brave the elements at all. Despite this, I think a lot of humans remain fascinated by weather, even if the life and death day-to-day consequences have been so smoothed over for many of us.


Central PA floods

The caveat is that the weather is changing--the world over. Maybe it's a good thing that no matter how sheltered an American suburbanite's life is, some of us, need to or not, are still paying (nerdy) attention to what's going on out there in the big world.

After all, Bad weather events--hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires--are Important Clues as to how our Mama is Feeling.

And we all should know by now that If Mama Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy. 





~~Juliet Waldron
Historical Novels
https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/