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OVERTURE

ALL THE WEATHERMEN of New England go mad eventually.

After a few decades spent attempting to predict the unpredictable, they succumb to a kind of meteorological nihilism and wander out of the studio mid-broadcast, muttering to themselves, and can be seen a week later selling wilted roses on the side of the highway.

It’s not the seasonal anarchy—all those balmy Christmases and washed-out Junes—but rather the perverse changeability of our daily weather, the adolescent moodiness of our sun and sky, that finally unravels the sweater of their sanity.

“In the spring, I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours,” Mark Twain, a Hartford resident for seventeen years, once quipped.

Yet while they may be doomed to fail, we don’t mock our weathermen. Even though we see them for what they are—oracles draped in sheep entrails—we don’t change the channel. We listen politely to their forecast.

And then we talk about it.

In New England, the weather is all we talk about, especially when we have nothing to talk about.

Lately, I’ve been suffering from writer’s block.

It’s a serious disease.

It struck Twain in the midst of composing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After scratching 400 handwritten pages over the course of a single summer, the author suddenly found he could not write another word. For years, Huck and Jim were left stranded on the river, paddling in place. Eventually, Twain found his cure: a refreshing 16-month trip through Europe.

I’m hoping to find my cure closer to home.

Over the next year, I plan to keep a weather journal, a kind of running retrospective forecast.

It will be accurate, for one thing. I can say it rained today with 100% certainty, for example, because I swallowed some of it.

But I have another reason for glancing at the near meteorological past. Writers only ever use the atmosphere for atmosphere. They never give the weather its literary due.

“Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience,” Twain wrote. “But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative.”

So here’s a place just for the weather: a snow globe without a figurine or a monument. Just the weather.

And maybe, probably, my reflection in the glass.