Empty Tornado
“I feel like an empty tornado inside
with nothing to tornado about
and then it starts to rain on my tornado
and it rains for years…”
~ Isabela, age 10
Yesterday - or was it the day before? - winds from Alberta met winds from the Gulf, somewhere over the plains, at the heart of the continent, and the two in their meeting squeezed the sky, so that wave upon wave of hurricane rain washed east. Another spinning cell sat over the Atlantic, so that all of heaven and all of earth was a howling torrent, and the lives arranged upon its surface blowing leaves.
As a species, perhaps we are better now then ever before at predicting the weather; or perhaps we are just more lucky now with our guesses, but we can’t see far, nor with much surety, only smell and feel for certain what is right at the end of our noses. Still… you live here long enough, while you may not know the pattern, you know a pattern exists. Like the apparent non-rhythm of an irrational number, whose digits string out from their start in a patternless pattern that we can’t quite make out.
The rock that lies beneath the wind, though, tells us that weather is weather. The eroded surfaces that seem to stream with invisible channels of forgotten rain, the carved shapes that the wind walked through, all of this tells us something about the weather: we live on a spinning top, night inexorably moves in the direction of the sun, clouds will always accumulate, and clouds by the very nature will also pass.