Elizabeth Gootzeit

As someone who has lived in the American Midwest most of my life, I am well versed in chatting about the weather, and there’s been much fodder for small talk these past weeks. Last month we experienced an unusually heavy snow followed by frigid temps that kept it all on the ground. Then in the past week we flipped from unforgiving cold to unseasonably warm temps, high enough to send a foot and a half of snow trickling into the sewers and summon bulbs out of hibernation.

Thursday warmth and moisture culminated in an evening thunderstorm and a tornado warning.

Today we’re switching off early spring and returning to our regularly scheduled February, with cold and even a bit of snow.

This has had me thinking back to a college writing instructor explaining how one might employ weather as more than set dressing, either to underline or contrast your character’s mood—how a gray sky and a sunny sky might both be used to highlight a grieving character, for example.

I was trying to remember the term for this technique, and first came up with “pathetic fallacy,” which, though a great term (with a great Wikipedia page), but that’s more about anthropomorphizing the weather or other natural phenomena. (“Space abhors a vacuum,” etc etc).

So perhaps I’m more thinking of the “objective correlative,” which is described here by the Poetry Foundation.

I digress, but my point was going to be the weather is unsettled and so am I. I do not know what the world will bring tomorrow—more winter, another dose of spring, or perhaps something else altogether.

Feeling more at the mercy of the wind than ever.

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Recently read: I’m in the midst of my first(!) read of Wuthering Heights since a friend is giving a talk on it at the end of the week. I believe I’ve read every other Brontë novel…

Recent watches: Five Centimeters a Second
Recent listens: The Adventure Zone podcast; a J-pop playlist faves like Kenshi Yonezu and King Gnu