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The first day was grey and cloudy. The next day was sunny. Then the icy cylinders around the virginia creeper vines on our deck glittered in the brilliant light. The poplars across the street were trees of glass. At certain angles, the tubes acted as prisms, sending colour dancing over the browns of the autumn landscape.
The weather pattern which caused these unusual effects eventually developed into an early November blizzard. The blizzard coincided with Wordpower, a writers' conference held in Winnipeg that year.
I was disappointed with the timing of the blizzard. It gave our out-of-province visitors too much opportunity to shore up stereotypes and make their tired jokes about Manitoba weather. How could they know nature had cast gorgeous glass showcases over everything just days earlier? Would they have believed it if we'd explained, running between the buildings of Concord College through that dreadful blustering and blowing? We Manitobans probably responded with equally-tired repartee about the weather where they come from.
Since weather-talk is used for brief exchanges with strangers, or to open conversations with friends, we think it's small talk, something superficial. But most of us take our weather very personally.
Weather-talk expresses our discouragements and our pleasures. It expresses our continual sense of surprise about life. When the weather is fine, we're delighted and wonder what we did to deserve it. When it's awful, we feel betrayed because we certainly didn't deserve it. Weather-talk expresses our attachments. Sometimes it hides tensions. Many Mennonite Brethren have lived in, or have relatives in, other regions of Canada. So we offer strong opinions about the comparative merits of weather in these places. Is this the easiest way, I wonder, to say there are differences between us and they bother us?
The assumption seems to be that we choose where we live. Superior people choose "superior" places. Or, they stay in "inferior" places because of their hardier characters. In reality, most of us live where we do for a complexity of reasons, many of them essentially involuntary. Love often follows location, rather than the other way around.
Our family lived in the Chaco, Paraguay for two years. I felt an unspoken rule: While local folk were free to grumble about the weather, an expatriate such as myself ought to be careful. Sighs or complaints could easily be heard as criticisms of the place, or even the people. Remarks on the climate's many pleasant aspects were well received, however.
This is as it should be. Wherever we happen to live, the weather of a place eventually gets into our souls, for better or for worse. Once it's ours, we want others to respect it.
(More about weather in the next issue.)
Dora Dueck is a writer and a member of Jubilee Mennonite Church in Winnipeg.
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