This Weather

The avalanche of fear accompanying the threat of Global Warming has always been a bit tempered by the thought that maybe, just maybe Seattle's gray wetness would evaporate. While Phoenix drowned in rainstorms, we'd luxuriate in warm, sunny weather at least 6 months out of the year instead of the standard 6 weeks.

But no, Global Warming (yes, capitalized) has only made our gray, wet, cold weather grayer, wetter, and colder along with windier and slightly more unpredictable. Every fall and spring the local news stations innundate us with footage of floods from the flatlands, but this year, the floods rolled down the hills and through the cities and right into our neighborhood tucked safely, we thought, on one of the many Seattle hills right into the winter. Winds blew out powerlines, snow piled 87 inches high in the mountain passes by mid-December, and below freezing temperatures are predicted for the next few nights.

This isn't uncommon, but the frequency has increased and the skies have looked everso more ominous on my walks with the dog.

Is it possible that the length of the winter days is actually shorter than ever before? Is it possible that the nights have stretched into a record length? Did we move north in latitude?

Today offered us a respite. Yesterday too. It was dry yesterday though not completely clear until the afternoon, but today was sunny if not warm, and dry if not any less muddy. We sat on our new neighbor's porch and felt the sun on our faces and arms and laughed about all the mishaps of moving and remodeling. Our young neighbors have just moved in after days and nights of painting and sanding, caulking and stripping. This is their first home and they have high hopes for its future, but for now it is liveable and big enough to hold the whole family -- 16 in the extended group -- for the New Year's Eve festivities.

For now, the sky is that blue no one can quite describe, trapped between cerulean and turquoise, the kind of blue on postcards sent from tropical oceans. The pink horizon gives no hint of Global Warming, unlike the often orange skyline of summer. The air is clear after weeks of rain, but it's cold as well, my breath lifting from me each time I take the dog out.

Years ago I met a woman in French Glen, Oregon on the edges of the wildlife refuge. It was early in the morning and she was sitting on the screened in porch of the old hotel painting the sky. Her canvas was the large palette of a sketchbook, previous pages turned back on a spiral binding.

"What are you painting?" I asked.

"The weather," she replied and never once let her paintbrush lift from its purpose.

"How do you capture something so statistical with paints?"

She smiled and looked up. "Like this." She folded back the pages of her sketch book to reveal day after day of paintings. In the bottom right hand corner of each page she'd written location, temperature, humidity, precipitation and almost every other meterological data one would find on the evening weather report. "I paint each day," she continued, "And try to capture in color and texture that vague statistical data you mention."

She'd done it, too. The days prior felt captured in her book -- the unexpected lightning storm of the previous day, the slant of the sun against the migrating birds resting in the refuge wetlands, and the cloud cover that greeted me as I drove into French Glen.

"How long have you been doing this?" I asked.

"I'm recording the weather each day for a year. I began on January 1st." She went back to painting, mixing the colors to produce just the right morning blue of the muggy August sky.

I think of that woman often especially when the weather challenges the forecasts. I admired her discipline and perseverance. I admired her creative genius. I admired her desire to chronicle something very few people would remember.

I cannot paint, but I've often thought about keeping a daily weather journal. Every time I try, though, I long for the tubes of color she had laid before her. Words are not magnificent enough to capture the bitter frost of tonight or the gusts of tomorrow's windstorms.

Perhaps Global Warming is just a cyclical event. Perhaps thousands of years ago the weather leapt from the skies to slice down trees and set forests ablaze. Perhaps great drifts of ice melted into flooding streams that carved rock and tossed boulders tumbling. Perhaps huge swaths of grasslands parched into sands. Perhaps humans are nothing more than rooted debris, tenuous fixtures about to be swept into the rising oceans. Perhaps it can't be stopped and the warmth of the skies will wipe the earth's slate clean of human life with all of our words and paints, our statistics and predictions.

Today I am simply moved by this weather, whatever the reasons.