A Word About the Weather

Weird.

One of my good friends, Rachael, asked about what is different here, and there is both a lot different and not much. It is a western society with strip malls and box stores, Mitre 10 instead of Home Depot and The Warehouse instead of Walmart, but it is also a place of wee villages and walking tracks, paddocks and rising hills of burnt out volcanoes outside everyone's back door. One thing though which is quite strikingly different is the weather. I know it sounds mundane, but it isn't.

New Zealand is a bitty island in the middle of a vast ocean, hardly a blip of land from a meteorological point of view. The weather and the wind, particularly in this part of the south island blows across without a thought that there is even a bit of ground to stop it on its way. There is a saying here: "Four seasons in a day." And it is absolutely true. The weather isn't a bit connected to what came before it by a day or even an hour. It can be blowing a "Southerly" out of Antarctica like Robert Frost's end of the world by ice in the morning and in the middle of the day it is a "Westerly" a hot wind that locals say make the children and old people crazy. By evening a cloud of cold mist might have rolled in down the hills and be sitting on the coast like a blanket, and the weathermen may be calling for a clear, fine day for the morrow. There is a fifty, fifty chance they will be right by the time tomorrow comes.

Like the landscape here, the weather is an active part of life. It is not a background figure. It has a presence and weight in life. Like the winter and the snow has in Maine, because of its impact on living and the glorious summer day as well because it was…well so glorious by contrast. But here it is all the time (at least so far, and I have been told it is always like this here in the south island.)

So that is my word about the weather: weird, very, very weird.