As a child, every year meant a new elementary school in some other established neighborhood, which meant long bus rides, and no friendships of any duration. My house, after all, was the only house for blocks. I think I spent the third grade in the gymnasium of another school district with children from other school-less neighborhoods. I think we were dazed by our circumstance of not belonging anywhere-we were all oddly isolated, needing twice daily transportation to a finished neighborhood. I would be a person uneasy indoors, happiest outdoors.
When very young, my exposure to weather was supervised, of course. But as I got older, I ventured afield slowly, then boldly. While the sunny, warm, cloudless and windless days had their charms, I was equally enamored of other weather. Storms were my first introduction to music. The air visible with wet July heat, clouds moving quickly from one side of the sky to the other, the music of thunder and the smell of lightning- this my own personal television show, with a new episode to come tomorrow. There seemed no disputing that I was the center of the world.
Once on a boat on a sunny midday in very heavy white fog, I was afraid in a way I have never felt again. Once it rained so hard the water seemed to be rising off the ground, not falling. On occasion my house shakes and my windows rattle from thunder. I wake up buried in snow. Routinely I would see weather not quite like any I had ever seen before; this is still the case 50 years later. Whatever the weather, I like it.
The temperatures still hover at or below the freezing mark here-typical for the Midwest. But there are signs of life. The butterburr flowers are stirring. They are preceded by huge cracks in the earth. Ungainly and ill-proportioned, they look dead as they emerge from the ground, and grow downwards back to the earth-astonishing. However unappetizing, these flowers are quickly replaced by giant, faintly prehistoric, leafy plants of equally astonishing scale. They form large colonies overnight-the kind that would spread into your house via the bedroom window-if you are not the vigilant sort.
