people of the south wind

I wonder, as the wet fall weather settles over Washington, how much of homesickness can be attributed to a physiological response to climate and geography. A friend described how her sense of direction was distorted when she left behind mountains and trees; I, on the other hand, haven’t yet learned to read the shifts of elevation and shade in the Northwest, the microclimates introduced by angle and exposure.

After living so long in one place, my eye is not yet accustomed to the unyielding green of Washington’s forests, nor my ear to the sound of wind approaching over mountains and water. Life on the plains is all about the sky, and the mingling of air and moisture over an open expanse of grass. The smell of the weather comes in on the wind: the heavy damp of a gathering thunderstorm, the dull bite of snow-laden wind. The red-gold of fall prairies dulls, by November, to a grayish-dun, under skies a paler, more opaque blue than the brilliance of September and October. One also marks seasons by the wind, and November is when it begins to hurt.

The joke is that Kansans always talk about the weather, and this is often true. We talk about it because tornadoes, blizzards, and adequate rainfall are nothing to be trifled with, but also because it is easier to talk about the weather than to talk about what weather does to us. Farmers remark on the hundredths of an inch that last night’s rainfall left in rain gauges or mention in passing the abnormally hot summer day, but such comments are voiced mainly as statements of the obvious. There is many a Kansan who follows a strict calendar for the use of heating and air conditioning, the observance of which is so ingrained as to become almost a moral code. Living in Kansas tempers expectations; one does not expect routinely fine weather any more than one would hope to find mountain splendors.

Often, when the tug of homesickness sets in, I find myself wishing not that I’d never left Kansas, but that I’d left it long ago, before the place had a chance to take hold.