I'm trying to imagine one Lincolnite who wasn't talking about the weather around 5 this afternoon. Maybe a surgery patient deep in the throes of anesthesia. But that's about it.
As for those people who make fun of Nebraskans for the way we talk about the weather? I say they are the ignorant ones. They are the ones who see life simplistically, as though they have control over it, an app for it, a way around it.
In our fervent focus on what's happening outdoors, Nebraskans acknowledge that we are intimately tied to the larger world and we had best pay attention. We know that our very lives are tied to the land, tested by the sun, moved by the winds. Just as we know the sweetness of Spring's first hyacinth, its purple buds nudging through the hard earth, filling us with hope.
In fact, we Midwesterners actually pity those who live with the burden of a single-season year, one so dull, so framed in sameness, that its days do not distinguish themselves from one another. Rather, they stack themselves, one atop the other, like so many lounge chairs around the pool.
Give me the menopausal frenzy of a Midwestern year, its days punctuated by violence and relief, heat and cold, fear and giddiness. I want to feel the bookends of this life, not just the soft middle with its fuzzy edges. I want to wonder, each day, what that day will bring.
That kind of wonder is happiest smack dab in the middle of the country, where weather's crossroads meet up and exchange stories.
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