Conditions
A Poem
Gray days follow one after another.
The weather report says we are in a drought, but my sidewalk is drenched with rain. The maples, which once scattered whirlybirds across the lawn, now shower me incessantly. The wind whips through my hair, slaps my face with cold blows.
How is the twenty-first century still so rife with weather, so dependent on rain and cursed with it? Every wedding, every graduation, every occasion with its rainy-day counterparts penciled in.
Twain may have thought it amusing to mock weather reports in literature, but what would a wedding be without sunshine or Christmas without snow or a drought that depletes corn crops and the price of soybeans on the commodities index?
It is not small talk to discuss the weather. Midwesterners know this: our very lives hang in the balance between swipes of wiper blades and slick black highways.