Upstate New York has its fair share of weather. I grew up making human chains to walk to school in the winter, the obligatory child suffocating in snowdrift story scaring us only enough to be sure we put air holes in the igloos we carved out of the piled-high snow on the side of the road. The battle of Man vs Nature is at the core of every resident in Western New York. It makes them special. Their struggle is special. It is as much outward as inward, as much against bitter wind, cold and lake effect snow as against the inner struggles of depression and light deprivation.
Even so, the south is weather of a different flavor. Living in "Tornado Alley" here in northwest Georgia is in fact more traumatic for me than the six-month winters of Buffalo and Rochester. There, your resistance is high for weather. It's a given, a friendly foe, it's coming, nothing to be done, two, three, four, five months of snow, sleet, ice, you just turn up your coat collar and deal with it.
Down here, it's different. Weather surprises you. Weather is something that jumps out from the side of the road out of nowhere, knocking your car from its happy little lane into a guard rail or worse. Weather is sirens. In the last week I think I've heard the tornado sirens three times. Today I had to brave thunder, lightning, tornados, and flooded roads to go fetch Jenna. We made it. But I was left with a homesick feeling for snowstorms and blizzards, which, at home in New York, blanketed entire cities and counties. Which you expected. Which rarely jumped out of nowhere like tornadoes, those boogie men that swirl round and then swoop down out of nowhere to carry you off.
