This morning it was
17 degrees warmer than yesterday morning. The night before last and
yesterday morning we had a cold north wind blowing. It was not
surprising that it was cold, the kind of cold that goes right through
your jacket and tells you winter is coming on hard. The grass on the
ground, frosted and white, crunched underfoot. It even smelled
cold -- a sharp, delicious tang with a hint of wood smoke. There was a
handful of low clouds scudding south, but high above were mare's tails
marching northeast. Otherwise the sky was crystal clear, blue to hurt
your eyes.
This morning, it felt like I was in the tropics. It wasn't actually
that warm, but it felt like it in contrast to the day before. In fact,
it felt like spring. There was a warm, south-southwesterly breeze and
it was raining. Not hard with blustering winds, but a gentle, steady
rain bending slightly before the wind. The air was thick, on the edge of
a fog, and there was fog in the valleys and low clouds shrouding the
hills. The sky was a solid, gray overcast and the day was dark. It was
delightful.
Later in the day, someone mentioned how remarkable it was that the
weather had changed so much in only one day, and I mentioned the wind
shifts, and was thinking about high pressure and low pressure wind
patterns and might have pursued the conversation further, but this
person responded, rather peevishly, what's the difference which way the
wind blows? Yeah. Wind is just wind. It blows this way and that
without any reason and has no influence on anything. Right. So I just
shrugged and ended my participation in the conversation.
It astonishes me how ignorant, and how aggressive people are in their
ignorance. This is most especially true when the subject is the natural
world.
One evening when I was in college, I once wandered by an outdoor
environmentalist rally, and as I paused to listen, the speaker gestured
to the thin crescent moon descending into the sunset and said something
blah blah just as the moon we see is rising blah blah and I shook my
head and walked away. People don't know the phases of moon or which way
is east and which west, yet talk about saving the planet.
And I think I'm dumb! I'm a genius compared to these morons.
But they are the ones with the public megaphone, and everyone listens to
them, not to people like me. Not that I have anything to say. I don't.
"Come said the wind to
the leaves one day,
Come o'er the meadows
and we will play.
Put on your dresses
scarlet and gold,
For summer is gone
and the days grow cold."
~ A Children's Song of the 1880s