Widespread Heavy to Excessive Rainfall Event in the Lower/Middle Mississippi Valley into the Ohio Valley
Slow-moving Tropical Depression Gordon continues to bring heavy to excessive rains across portions of the lower Mississippi Valley. Friday, moisture from Gordon will spread north into the Middle Mississippi Valley and interact with an existing frontal boundary, where several days of rain has already saturated the soils, increasing the potential for excessive rain and flash floods.
National Weather Service, September 7, 2018
So said the National Weather Service on Friday, and they weren’t wrong. It has rained steadily since before dawn on Saturday and continued into today, leaving us with 3.7 inches according to my backyard rain gauge. Seems to me like an appropriate time to talk about the weather. Frank McKinney Hubbard was a Hoosier cartoonist, humorist,
and journalist better known by his pen name “Kin” Hubbard. He was the creator of the cartoon Abe Martin of Brown County which ran in U.S. newspapers from 1904 until his death in 1930, and he was the originator of many quips. One of my favorites is, “Don’t knock th’ weather. Nine-tenths o’ th’ people couldn’ start a conversation if it didn’ change once in a while.”
Regardless of whether it dominates my conversation, it does occupy my daily affairs. I think about it when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. I think about how cold or hot it will be and what the prevailing winds will bring to the day. It tells me what to wear, whether I can do any gardening, whether a hike in the woods will be washed out, or whether I should get the snow shovel out of the shed.
Sometimes I get caught in the weather doldrums and each day bleeds into the next. Another hot day, another day of rain, more cold, expect a high of this and low of that, the relative humidity will be this or the barometer is rising. Our daily newspaper devotes a half page to local and national weather statistics. I can find the hi and lo temperature yesterday in Des Moines and the river stages of the East Fork of the White River at Columbus and Seymour. Heck, I can even find out when the moon rises and sets.
It can be easy for me to get lost in the statistics sometimes and lose sight that weather is also personal; it transcends mere statistics and takes me into a more spiritual realm. There is something deep inside me that is stirred by a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, the lightning illuminating the room like midday; or walking in the woods during a snowstorm as the wind stirs the tree branches and the snow pelts my face; the first hard frost of the season, glistening in the morning sun; the dew on the grass in summer laying like pearls on the ground; or the character of each cumulus cloud floating above me in the fall sky. I simply love the weather that each season brings. It is the weather, more than anything that will propel me into a more pensive mood. Watching a thunderstorm rolling in from the west reminds me of the awesome power of nature, the cool wind charging ahead of the storm strikes my face; the leaves turn over in the trees, the rolling thunder, the flash of lightning, and then that first raindrop. I refuse to go inside at least until the rational half of my brain suggests it would be best.
I come from a long line of farmers, carpenters, and preachers, the latter profession perhaps watching a little more closely for thunder and lightning. There were my maternal great-grandparents who all came to the country from Germany. One was an accomplished orchardman, herbalist, and farmer and the other a well-respected farmer and landholder in southern Bartholomew County. My maternal grandfather farmed and managed the local feed store. Then there was the Illinois Irish on my paternal side, a bit more scandalous than the Germans. There was my great-grandfather. born out of wedlock, fathered by the local schoolmaster. My grandfather was a carpenter and worked for a dollar an hour in the 1930’s. I have always enjoyed John Prine’s song, My Grandfather was a Carpenter, but mine didn’t chain smoke Camel straights but I do know he liked his Chesterfields. Another great-grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, preaching fire and brimstone from the pulpit, and the other delivered the mail by horse and buggy, gently prodding his horse along whatever the weather.
I often think of my ancestors and how much the weather influenced their days, whether hammering a nail, planting corn, delivering the mail, or haranguing the congregation from the pulpit. The weather plays a bit less of a role in my work as I am able to write these words in the comfort of my study, even as the rain continues to fall outside. Like my ancestors though, I will always be aware of the weather, whether as a point of conversation, a reminder of the beauty and power that comes from the skies, or as a stimulus for much deeper thought.