We Need To Talk About The Weather

In Chicago, Big Boss Weather is King.  It's either the weather's way or you'd better move to California--which is exactly what I think about doing about halfway through each winter I've spent in Chicago. 'Time to move back west,' I tell anyone who will listen, 'yep, I'll be damned if I spend another winter walking into tiny, wind-driven ice-shards that  always seem to blow into your face no matter which direction you go.' That last part is often just muttered to myself as i plunge through said ice-shards, known in more optimistic circles as 'snow,' cursing internally every step of the way. I used to get so angry with the weather. Like a rebellious teenager, I was fed up with having my life defined by this external, inexorable force that just didn't get me. I like to look cute and wear heels, Weather, stop putting this gross muddy snow all over the ground! Dammit Wind! There you go ruining an otherwise beautiful day and forcing me to stagger down the sidewalk fighting to keep my skirt down like a misguided Marilyn Monroe parody. I tried to call Winter depression anything else. Surely something like the Weather, that small-talk starter, that minor factor in deciding what to wear in the morning, couldn't be causing anything more than a case of the grumps? Weather seemed too trivial to have anything to do with serious mood alterations.


Of course, weather isn't trivial at all.  After all, winter coats and boots are expensive. Heat is expensive. If money is tight, as is nearly always the case for me, budgeting for the winter  is no trifle. If I also had a family to support, an infant or an elderly mother to worry about keeping warm and healthy,  a wheelchair to navigate through snow, well, then the weather becomes even less trivial. It matters.

Warm weather isn't all festivals and bike rides and ice cream either. Hot weekends, especially hot holiday weekends, typically see a spike in murders , spurred by the volatile mix of heat-aggravated tempers, alcohol, and large quantities of people out and about and sharing space. Again, Weather isn't trivial  it can shape our lives, like it or not. Is it any wonder we spend so much time talking about it here in Chicago?

Now, I'm sure my extensive readerships in Nome, Alaska and the middle of the Sahara are probably raising their eyebrows right now. 'You think you have it hard down there in Chicago?', I imagine my number one fan in Nome, Alaska--let's call him Yuri-- is probably sneering as he breaks icicles off his beard. 'You think it gets hot over there in Chicago?!' my number one reader in the Sahara, Leila we'll call her, is scoffing while she cracks an egg, which fries in midair before even hitting the Saharan sidewalk. Well, you see Yuri, you see Leila, it's not just the level of heat or cold. It's the sudden, violent changes in temperature. 90 degrees one day, 40 degrees the next. Sun in the morning, thunderstorms in the afternoon, sun again in the evening, perhaps followed by some random hail. The weather giveth, only to take away again. 'Right,' Yuri says, 'I'll take a 90 degree day. Send it this way.' 'Cry me a river,' says Leila out there in the Sahara, 'then at least there would be some water out here in this desert I live in.'

So maybe the point isn't that Chicago has it worse than anywhere else. Surely it doesn't. But we sure do spend a lot of breath talking about the weather. We spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it. We plan our days around it. Do people in other cities do the same? Probably? Surely? I wouldn't know. I do know that here it seems to be one thing that holds us all together in a strange way. No matter how different we are, we're all under the thumb of the Mayor with the endless term. That fact provides its own tenuous sense of community whether in the simple warm weather euphoria that sweeps over everyone on the most beautiful days in June, the giddy, fearful incredulity shared by a handful of strangers in a bar during ThunderSnow 2011, or the knowing glances and shakes of the head exchanged between other strangers taking cover in a bus shelter after a previously clear sky has suddenly dissolved into torrential rain. Are these types of moments exclusive to Chicago? Probably not. But for a girl from California who didn't used to understand the importance of weather, those moments are integral to the feel of my city.