HUMOUR

When You are Taken to Weathering Heights

An open letter to the person(s) responsible for the weather reports.

Dear Mr. or Ms. Weatherer,

First, I must thank you for all the hard work you do in predicting what is to happen weather-wise for the next day, for the next five days, and even sometimes when you are feeling quite ambitious, for the next ten days. I check your reports every morning to decide whether I should take a raincoat or my pretty pink parasol and sunshades with me when I leave home.

You are sometimes correct, but mostly wrong. I am sorry to burst your raindrop, but you are. The most recent cause of my vexation, and perhaps the last proverbial straw that broke this donkey’s back, was when you told me that it was going to rain all weekend.

I was happy to hear that news because we have been having a full-on drought since the beginning of the year. Even the weeds that seem to thrive in the cracks in the pavement are not growing. Mosquitoes have been having a hard time this year — no stagnant water for them to lay their eggs, and they are not pleased at all. I am sure their life cycle will be disrupted in 2021, and it was not from the pandemic. It is bad enough that they did not gain as much acclaim as that other one with their Zika and Chikungunya war and now this climate change and fickle rain is causing them even more problems — as if there is some conspiracy that is aiming for their extinction.

But I did not come here to plead the plight of the mosquito. I came to complain about how you got me all excited like many of those smoke but no cigar lovers I have been meeting recently and then left me high and dry — literally.

I had my Kindle fully charged just in case the heavy downpours caused my electricity to go out; my pink pajamas — the ones where the material have worn thin in all the right places; and my favourite coffee mug washed and ready for a rainy-and-loving-it weekend only to get up this morning to a brilliantly blue sky, so blue that I swore it was laughing at me. There was not a dark cloud to be seen for miles. As a matter of fact, not a single wisp was visible.

Many people complain about you but they just grumble under their breath or make it a topic for idle conversation. Well, I am officially writing you to register my ire.

What am I to do with my rainy day pj’s, charged device and washed mug? Place the shirt over my head as an umbrella from the sun and use the mug to hold some hard lemonade while I find some shade under a tree to read, you say?

Oooh, so you are an expert in giving advice, not predicting weather?

Anyway, we are just starting our annual hurricane season and I hear that a group of you created the rhyme we learned since we were children;

June too soon July standby August a must September remember October all over.

Well, we are having hurricanes and storms in May these days so you need to go back to your charts and radars and do some edits. May I suggest May make way? and June never too soon?

But back to my original complaint. Since it's July, I am standing by for that rain you promised me.

Yours in weathering the weather,

I. Trudie