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| Billie Silvey |
| March 2007 |
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| An eclectic website about Women, Christianity, History, Culture and the Arts--and anything else that comes to mind. |
| Weather |
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| When I was growing up in the Panhandle of Texas--a flat, dry, treeless expanse of land--my family didn’t have a lot. We did have a lot of sky, though--a huge dome stretching from horizon to horizon in all directions-- and a great deal of weather. People used to say that, if you didn’t like the weather in the Panhandle, you should just wait a few minutes. It would change. Wind. The first weather I became aware of in our part of the state was the wind. My first memory of unusual weather, which was the usual thing there, was one day when I was about five. It was before we moved to Happy, and I was staying at my Granny’s house there. The bedroom darkened, though it was the middle of the day, and there was a strange glow in the air. Looking out the window, I couldn’t see anything but red. It was a dust storm. The ground in Happy was gray-brown. The nearest red earth was in Palo Duro Canyon or, beyond that, the Red River dividing Texas from Oklahoma. Strong winds were a constant. Hot winds in summer blasted us with sharp grains of sand or the sudden splatters of thundershowers. Cold winds in the winter stung us with frigid air or tiny crystals of snow. Folks in the Panhandle used to say that there was nothing separating us from the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence. Clouds. On summer afternoons as a child, I loved to watch great banks of white, puffy clouds build into fantastic shapes against the clear blue sky. I couldn’t see them without imagining pictures in the clouds--a giant face, an airplane, a rabbit. On other days, the clouds would be thin and streaky, like someone had pulled the cotton batting for a quilt too thin and it was stringing and tearing apart. Other times, the clouds were mottled like fish scales. Storms. In such a dry climate, we didn’t get a lot of rain, but when it came, it, too, tended to be dramatic. We’d be riding down the highway, and all around us, we’d see long, slanted streaks of rain from dark clouds lit by sudden flashes of lightning and cracked by loud bursts of thunder. Sometimes the clouds would turn a heavy green-grey, and hail would batter the ground. That was when we hurried inside, because small pieces of ice jumping in the grass could suddenly grow to the size of hen’s eggs or baseballs, able to do real damage if they hit us or dent the car if we were on the road. Other times, the clouds would grow bumpy on their undersides. These bumps could quickly grow to longer extensions which, whipped by the winds, could lengthen into dust devils hopping across the plain, or even into devastating tornadoes. I heard stories of straw forced into fence posts and houses turned to splinters. Once, when a tornado struck a faraway town, we found a report card in our yard belonging to a child there. It had been picked up by the tornado and carried in the clouds. Blizzards. Most winters, we didn’t get snow, but occasionally, dry snow driven by strong winds would build up in tall drifts that stretched from the roof of our house to the eaves of the neighbor’s across the street. Then the town would grind to a halt, and school would let out because roads were totally impassable. At least one morning, I remember my dad climbing out a window to blaze a trail to the storage shed to get a shovel so he could clear the tall drifts against our screendoors that made it impossible to open them. Cattle would die huddled along barbed-wire fences that were invisible under the snow. In this website, we’ll be considering climate change, conducting an interview with a meteorologist, and wondering where God is in the storms of life. I’d love to get your reaction to this website, as well as your memories of weather in various parts of the world. Just email me at b.silvey@sbcglobal.net. |
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