The Pathetic Fallacy

I

It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.

—Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, 1922

It snowed this morning in northern Stout County. Two inches on the ground by daybreak, another four by noon. I know this not because I live in Stout County, north or south. I don't. Nor do I plan to travel there soon. I won't. Rather, I know it because my father lives in northern Stout County, and this is what we talk about.

"People probably aren't taking it too hard," he says. In March, the snow melts a little faster in northern Wisconsin. He pauses to consult the digital thermometer that I know rests on the scraped kitchen counter. The digital thermometer is his joy; it reports the temperature from a prudently placed thermometer just outside the old house, then the indoor temperature, and the humidity level. I have seen him glance at it the way commuters at a bus stop check their watches. He's waiting for something, but I don't know what.

"Twenty degrees," he reports. "That's up from nine at breakfast." I picture him stirring the steel-cut oats, the blue-black of a winter night resolving itself into morning's gray, steam from the wide saucepan smudging the kitchen window. I can see the anticipatory light in his eyes as he glances at the temperature before sitting down to eat. If my mother is in the room, he will announce it to her.

"How is it in the foothills?" he asks me now. "Are you really close to sixty?"

This is what we talk about. We have always talked about the weather. There are no impressionistic flourishes to our descriptions, no established code of double entendre. We exchange the facts of our respective weather systems like two farmers remarking on the crop report. Yet despite the spareness and regularity of these dispatches, there is an enthusiasm that enters my father's voice when he begins his account of that week's precipitation and temperature highs. In this respect, it seems that, for my father, there is always hope in the weather. It could always be warmer or sunnier next week, is the basic idea. A place like northern Stout County allows for that.

When I return the phone to its cradle on this early March evening, I am facing dusk in the Rockies. The temperature has dropped to near freezing, as it will do most any night here outside of deepest summer, and I have cloaked myself in an afghan during the course of my father's Sunday night weather report. From the sliding window that my folding desk faces, I can just make out the peaks of the photo-stock mountain view this town boasts. The foothills have, relatively speaking, been a boon to our father-daughter conversations. Of all the places I have lived, this is the only one where that ubiquitous local assurance, Don't like the weather? Wait a minute, is wholly accurate. The front range of a mountain system is something of a lightning rod for weather systems that are just passing through, for cold fronts and warm fronts that are otherwise too far beyond the sky for most peopled grounds to attract them. The front range, I have learned, is a mercurial host, coaxing bright warmth for an afternoon, only to dash it away with the next morning's sleet and hard hail. My father has listened, interjecting low whistles, as I attest to what he's read in the morning paper. Emily Post was not wrong. We have had a lot to talk about this year.

"What's the weather supposed to do tomorrow?" Soon-Jin asks me at lunch, stabbing at the last of his cafeteria noodles, posing the question as if the weather were a lounge act whose next performances were subject to the whims of a diva. His expertly gelled hair glistens beneath the midday sunlight of a foothills sky.

"Overcast in the morning...