Normally, this time of year, the days would be mild and warm, on-and-on-and-on, with nary a break for weeks. The May sunlight is usually blinding--especially in the early morning. I open my eyes dreamily the minute the rays burst into my room. There is dazzling blue beyond the cracks in my blinds. My surroundings look more desirable and expensive than they actually are, with the walls and floors gleaming.

Not this year. We've had lots of rain, late. I've opened my eyes to bleak weather, I don't know how many days this month. I look out and see no blue, not a speck, only clouds as opaque as masonry.

The paper has carried stories on the unusually wet spring, citing damage to fruit crops in California's Central Valley. Only a curt phrase: "a persistent trough of low pressure in the upper atmosphere," is offered to explain the anomalous weather.

I ruminate about the wet spring. I think about the "low pressure trough" over the Pacific Ocean, a mischievous groove in the heavens, a conduit wicking storms over the sodden, resentful mainland, so late in the year. What about this trough? What caused it?

Given that I am sheltered and have enough to eat, given that there have been no lives lost to the weather, only strawberry and plum crops damaged, why do I think so much about it?

I don't like the gray this time of year. It's depressing, it's irksome, it destroys whatever tenuous connection to the seasons we in California have.

What happens six miles above my head is none of my concern, or shouldn't be. I did not cause the "low-pressure trough," I cannot do anything about it.

But it sounds like a way to rationalize policy in a dysfunctional workplace.

It was an "upper management" decision, to send rains in May; ours is not to question why.

I say, never fall for the platitudes. Don't "try to put it out of your mind," if the days are too gloomy. The gods of weather are to be scrutinized and understood, on your terms. If you don't like something, ask questions about it, and this applies to May weather. You won't abolish clouds. You won't get a degree in meteorology and "move up" far enough to affect policy, but you will have used the mind God gave you, before you relax into inevitability.
9:48:35 AM    comment []