Remembering Old Weather
I can remember how the painted wooden planks of our front porch felt on my bare feet during the hot and lazy days of July. I can remember the smell of the dirt in Pa Land’s garden after it had been churned up during a night of pelting rain. I can remember the delight of looking out my bedroom window and discovering a blanket of snow had fallen making even the ugliest parts of my yard beautiful. I can remember heading off to school on cool crisp mornings that gradually morphed into bitterly cold trips as October and November became December and January begging for coats, ear muffs and mittens. I can remember the beginning of Atlanta’s Great Ice Storm of 1973 – the clink, clink, clink of sleet as it began to coat every surface signaling we would be homebound for the next fifteen days or so. Weather has an important role to play in our historical memory. It changes our picnic plans. Derails a lunch we might have planned with an old friend or hits us in the pocketbook. It does not matt...