Weathered by Joanne Lowery Push a buzz saw through my thighs and you won’t see two columns of felled oak trees with their age transcribed in rings. Measure instead my recollection of the blizzard that shut our high school for two weeks, then the one after the birth of my son. Big weather, freakish and record-setting, plots memory on the x-axis of time. Year of the Drought when small lakes became mud baked into crazed geometry. Year of That Other Big Snow when my son built elaborate forts and frozen castles. Year of the Flood—the one we’re being compared to now as dams bulge and high-water marks exceed themselves. In ’93 the floodplain was described as an area the size of New Jersey as if New Jersey were a unit of measure. Do we want this flood to be worse as a way to win a meteorological contest? Maybe this flood is not as bad as back then. Once I loved someone like a dozen Kansas tornadoes. Now the forecast is above average, like Wyoming. 94 theMeadow
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