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132 dayS inTo eSSayS A Self for All Seasons ven now, fifteen years later, I can still see the soap suds in the wine glass, still behold my reflection in the kitchen window that mid-December evening, when out of nowhere , it seemed, I was visited by something like the muse. How else to account for the writing project that suddenly came to mind while doing the dishes? As it first occurred to me that night in the waning days of 1994, the task was relentlessly simple—I would write a brief weather report every day during the coming year, from January first to December thirty-first of 1995. Just a paragraph or two, but enough to produce a detailed record of the year’s weather, taking stock of the temperature, wind speed, rainfall, snowfall, and other measurable phenomena, and describing what it looked like and felt like each dayon my hillside lot in Iowa City—a placewhere I’d spent twenty-five years witnessing the flow (and sometimes the clash) of arctic- and gulf-born weather systems. What better to do, I thought, than make something of that experience and the tempestuous weather that often blows my way? What I didn’t think of just then is how I could produce a book about the weather without any knowledge of it, except from the perspective of a fanatic vegetable gardener. Nor did it occur to me that anyone might be put off by the prospect of reading incessantly about the weather. For the minute that bizarre project came to mind, it took hold of me like an obsession , so that even Kate, my resident skeptic and wife, came to think I’d go through with it. Strange as it now seems, the more I thought about the project, the more alluring it became, for it appealed to an intense hunger I was feeling back then to do something completely different from the personal essays and memoirs I’d been reading and teaching and writing about over the previous thirty years. The weather would give me the opportunity to see if I could produce a substantial work of literary nonfiction about something outside of myself, beyond my inner life, something that didn’t rely on long-term memory but ven now, fifteen years later, I can still see the soap suds in the wine glass, still behold my reflection in the kitchen window that mid-December evening, when out of nowhere , it seemed, I was visited by something like the muse. How else to account for the writing project that suddenly came to E Days into Essays 133 on a firsthand observation of things that I could put into words like “north wind,” “snowfall,” “hailstorm,” and “hoarfrost”—words that seemed to correspond to the things themselves. The writer’s inescapable delusion, but a necessaryone, especially fora weather book oranyother kind of naturewriting. And that’s what I fancied myself doing, as if I had the scientific knowledge to be an authentic nature writer. Given such an irrational presumption, it should come as no surprise that I was also driven by a high and mighty ambition. For by NewYear’s Day, I thought of my work-​ to-​ be as the embodiment of a new literary hybrid—an essayistic journal. Not just a series of brief weather reports as I’d originally planned. But a sustained record of daily observations and reflections, each entry both a free-​ standing essay in its own right and an episode in the overarching story of the year’s weather. A five-​ hundred-​ word essay each day, so I wouldn’t ever lapse into mere jottings or notations of data. The same average length each day, so that every day and every entry would have equivalent weight in my story of the year’s weather. In other words, my work-​ to-​ be would ultimately constitute a daybook/essaybook/ yearbook all wrapped in one. Or as my best friend called it, “a monstrous personal project.” Or, as I told myself in a soothing reverie, “my journal will be something like a Renaissance sonnet sequence, but in this case a contemporary essay sequence, the likes of which has never been tried before.” So, it’s no wonder that I scoffed at the suggestion of a colleague who advised me early in January not to worry about missing a day now or then. “It’s the kind of liberty,” he said “that contemporary writers feel free to take now and...

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