Come Rain or Shine

Come Rain or Shine
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 24, 2014

Every morning, even before I roll out of bed, I wonder how the sky is behaving. I lie still for those few moments between sleep and wakefulness and take a guess at the weather.

I prise open my right eye (the one nearest the window) and make a mental measurement of the light streaming in through the gap in the curtains. Sometimes, the brightness bounces painfully off my retina. I clamp my eye shut and my brain registers with a jolt that it’s sunny outside. Other mornings, there’s only a soft splash of daylight that dapples the carpet and I sense it’s overcast, clouds on the move.

As I throw back the doona and my feet kiss the floor, I can tell you whether the air this morning is crisp, chilly, bracing or brisk. Crisp is any May morning before 7am. Chilly is unpleasantly cold. Bracing is cold, but pleasantly invigorating. Brisk is for the conversation I have with the man next door after nipping out to get The West in my nightie.

How’s the weather at your place then? It’s how the world speaks to us. The weather tells me what to wear. It alters my mood, colours my day. It can even change my plans.

Weather is the universal language of strangers, a conversation-starter that guarantees an ally: “Geez, how cold was it this morning?” No-one argues over the weather. I can predict rain and never be held to account. I can complain incessantly about the weather and escape being branded a whinger. A bore, maybe, but not a whinger.

My nan was the family meteorologist. During the long summers of my childhood, she would have daily discussions about the weather with Mrs Anderson next door. They’d talk across the side fence, standing in their respective backyards. Being seven or eight, I could only make out the top of Mrs Anderson’s head, but Nan got to see her bloomers on the line.

“Chance of rain?” Mrs Anderson would ask. I could just make out her mouth moving in the gap between the pickets. She and my Nan would crane their necks and take in the sky, all hopes pinned on one lonely little cloud adrift in iridescent blue. “We should be so lucky!” my Nan would say matter-of-factly, and then they’d change the subject and talk about the humidity.

Some mornings, my Nan would swap fences to the eastern side to confer with Mrs Fry. Mrs Fry had tight white curls and a lovely husband called Mr Fry, who slipped me a jelly bean every time I pulled a weed from his front lawn. His wife hated the heat even more than my Nan did. “Chafe! she’d complain loudly. “All you get from this weather is chafe!” And my Nan would nod sagely.

My Nan had two sayings which she alternated depending on the season. During a stinking hot summer Nan would chant, “This heat will be the end of me!” and in the winter, she’d declare “This cold is going to give me chilblains.”

I never understood what chilblains were but Nan was always warning me: “Don’t sit so close to the radiator. You’ll get chilblains.” I didn’t sit on her cold lino either, because she said that would give me something called piles.

These days, the weather isn’t just geographical, it’s extraterrestrial. It’s photographed from outer space, probed, plotted, and predicted. We can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and smart phones.

My husband is obsessed with the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar plots. He is not normally excitable. But if I glance out the window and casually inquire: “What’s the weather doing?” he’ll hurry over to his computer. Madly tapping his keyboard, he’ll pull up the satellite images of the West Australian coastline. He’ll zoom in on a low pressure system a hundred nautical miles out to sea and declare: “Rain tonight! Maybe three millimetres. About midnight!” Teenage son and I trade smirks.

The weather shapes our identity. We pride ourselves on how well we recover when the floodwaters recede, the fires are doused, the cyclone dissolves to a squall. In our family, elders recount survival stories from Cyclone Tracy. The devastation and trauma are passed over in favour of a ripping yarn: “It was Christmas Day you know, and your Auntie Jill had a turkey in the oven, and you know where your Uncle Ray found it? The cyclone had blown it clean out of the oven and it was floating in the neighbour’s pool!”

Remembering that story, I tell it to my youngsters. “What’s a cyclone?” asks my six year old. I point to their father who is tracking his satellite radars. “Let’s ask the weather-master shall we? And while he’s at it, he can tell us what it’s gonna be like tonight!”

“Dark” he says. And with a smug look on his face, he slams shut the lid of his laptop.