Weather

Gratitude 5/6/2026

May 07, 2026

I am grateful for the gift of a new day.
My heart is filled with gratitude for the many blessings I have.
I will appreciate the small joys and express my thanks in all circumstances.
Let my attitude of gratitude bring joy to others.

I’m grateful that I have been spared from experiencing disastrous weather events.

My grandmother survived the deadliest tornado in American history, the Tri-State Tornado in March 1925 in Murphysboro, Illinois. I’m here today because she did.

I think I saw a tornado once when we were driving to Florida to visit my in-laws. It was high in the sky, but it was dramatic. We’ve had a lot of tornado watches and warnings over the years during the summer, and we’ve gone down to the basement until the warning is lifted, but we’ve never experienced a tornado.

We have had a lot of wind storms and some of those have taken trees down. Living here a chain saw has come in handy many many times.

I woke up this morning to the sound of a heavy rain. It is a familiar sound. There are lots of songs about rain and snow. “You and me and rain on the roof. Caught up in a summer shower. Maybe we’ll be caught for hours.” “Let It Snow.” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” “I Love to Walk in the Rain.” There are lots of songs about all kinds of weather. We live with weather, whether we pay attention or not.

Especially after we got air conditioning in the mid 60’s, I spent a lot of my youth without giving weather much of a thought. In Northern Virginia, it did get cold and snowy and hot and incredibly muggy. It it snowed, I anticipated school being called off. A SNOW DAY! Hooray. It was not at all unusual for the Federal Government to have a snow day, too because so many people didn’t know how to drive in the snow.

In the summer the gnats were really bad. Somehow I thought that gnats would navigate to the highest point on my body, so I would stand in a softball field with my hands above my head during the game. But those little pests would always find their way into my eyes and nose.

After we got airconditioning, in Virginia, I remember opening the front door of our house and feeling such a rush of hot muggy air, it made me feel sick. Years later after we moved to Ohio, my neighbor, a life-long farmer, claimed that air conditioning changed people’s summer life. He never saw kids playing outside, as they always did before their houses were comfortable.

It was incredible when I moved to Worcester, Masschusetts to go to college that I could hang a wet towel out on the line on my apartment’s back porch and it would dry quickly. In Virginia it took forever for clothes to dry on the clothes line because it was so humid.

I remember one December it was in the 70s in Virginia. That was really unusual. We’ would often drive to Miami to visit our grandparents during winter break and we expected the weather to be warm enough for us to go to the beach, but not in Virginia. Massachusetts got colder with more snow.

When I moved to Ohio on my family farm, after I graduated college, I could not avoid being aware of the weather. Farmers live and die by the weather. Years ago I attended a funeral and afterwards sat for lunch at a table with several older farmers. They spent the entire time talking about major weather events they had experienced in the decades gone by. Droughts, floods, snowstorms, windstorms… all had had a major affect on their livelihoods. It wasn’t just a question of being able to get to school or work. Weather affected when they could plant or harvest and what kind of crop they would have. It affected whether their livestock had enough to eat and sometimes whether their animals would live or die.

When I was teaching I still thrilled at getting a snow day. But navigating too much rain, hail, sleet, or snow has been a little too exciting. And it’s gotten more “exciting” as I’ve gotten older. Many times, we have had to shovel our cars out after getting stuck. Years ago, we had a neighbor whose house was atop a little hill on our rural road. When it snowed, he would get his tractor ready and spent the days and nights pulling cars out of the snow.

The most severe weather I have experienced out here was during the blizzard of 1978 that occured in at the end of January. It brought heavy snowfall, high winds, and extreme cold with whiteout conditions. Most of the state paralyzed without electricity. I was teaching then but transportation systems, schools, and businesses were all closed.

Our rural road was not able to be plowed for many days. Our long lane was impassable for a few weeks. And we were stuck at home. We would go out to the car to listen to the reports on the radio. Our food supplies ran low. At that time we had a fireplace, but no wood burner, so we were very serious about keeping the fire going. It was like the pioneer days.

A few winters, the temperature has fallen to -10 and worse. Once when it got so cold, I woke up in the middle of the night, as I usually do, and the house was really cold. It turned out the electricity had gone off. When this happens, I look out and check to see if the neighbors have any lights on. This time there were lots of lights. It was very cold but very still. I called our rural electric cooperative and they had no reports from anyone else, but they would send a truck out. I stoked the wood burner, woke Stewart to tell him what was going on and crawled back in bed under our down blanky.

About 3am, some headlights drove up the lane and stopped at the house. Someone walked up to our electric meter, which was just outside our bedroom window. Then they drove back down the lane shining a light on the electric wires. They stopped at the end of the lane…for a long time. About 5am the alarm clock flashed on. The headlights came back up the lane and I got out of bed. The electrician told me that something had snapped at the connection to our house right along the road. Times like this, I realize how much I take “modern conveniences” like electricity and heat for granted!

In 1991, we had a major drought. Our pond got so low and the banks dried up. The rocks that formed the edge of the pond oversaw a sea of grass, not water. All the pine trees my grandparents had planted by the pond died.

We have always had trouble with water in the basement when we get a big rain. The house was built with a stone foundation in 1837 and no matter what we do with gutters and drainage, we still get water in the basement. One time the sump pump stopped working and the basement was flooded with several inches of water. That was NOT fun, but it caused me to get rid of a lot of stuff.

A couple times, we have had so much rain, the creeks overflow and our road is closed.

In 2024 we installed a geothermal heating and cooling system when we had to replace the propane furnace we installed in 2000, because it had become unreliable and because the air conditioning was no longer working. We had spent several hundred dollars fixing the air conditioning and it would stop working again in a few days.

We were advised to keep the geothermal system at a steady 70 degrees. It switches automatically from heat to cooling. To save money, I used to hold out into the fall before I turned the heating on or to use the AC. But now it just does it on its own. We don’t bother opening the windows.

In old pictures of our house, the windows had shutters. But they were gone when my grandparents remodeled in the 50s.

In the 1980s, we had our windows restored and storm windows and screen windows made. Every Thanksgiving, we would put the storm windows in for the winter and sometime in the spring take them out and put the screens in. It’s a big job. I would wash all the windows twice a year and Stewart would put the big windows in or take them out. Last year, we left the storm windows in all summer. Oh, my.