The Weight Of The Weather

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight I will again read from the compilation titled Outlaw Creative (the geometry of life).

And tonight I have something very special, something that sort of hits home with me.

Tonight's reading will be from the aptly titled The Weight of the Weather, and as far as I can tell, according to my best sources, this piece takes its genesis from the author's granddaddy. And so, let's begin.

The old man didn't explain what he meant, not the first time.

He just said it once, like a weather report. Something's off in the pressure. There's weight in the air that don't belong there.

Then he stopped and kept sharpening his blade. No one argued. Not because they believed him, but because when a man like that says something strange, you don't interrupt it.

You let it sit. You let the air range around it. Years later, I came to feel that weight myself, not all the time, not often, but it would come low and slow, like the heaviness before a hard rain.

And when it came, the leaves turned a different direction. Birds stopped calling. Even dogs fell silent.

It wasn't fear exactly, it was something older than fear, more stubborn, like the ground remembering something your blood had forgotten. The weight of the weather is not barometric.

It's not the heaviness of humidity or the crackle of heat or the whip of a front coming through. No. This kind of weight is not caused.

It's revealed. It comes from something that has always been here and which will be here after we are gone. Something that watches, listens, waits.

The weather we mean here is not the weather of clouds and wind. It's the moral weather, the weather of the soul. There are places in the world where the land still remembers.

My granddaddy knew them. He'd walk up to a grove of bent trees and feel the pull of something gone wrong. He'd say, that one's carrying something it can't speak.

Then he'd kneel in the soil, whisper low and wait. Sometimes for minutes. Sometimes for hours.

The weight of the weather is a burden shared between the land and those who still know how to listen to it. Most don't. They pave their listening over with traffic noise, television static, and academic confidence.

But the few who remember, the walkers, the watchers, the bone listeners, they know. And they feel it in the marrow. I've heard that in certain cultures, storms are seen as spirits trying to make sense of the harm that has been done in a place.

The thunder, their argument, the wind, their breath, the rain, their weeping, I believe that, or something like it. What I know for sure is this. Sometimes the air goes heavy not because of what is coming, but because of what is here, because truth is standing in the corner of the room, waiting to be noticed.

You can't push your way through weather like that. You can't cut it, or preach it, or manage it. The weight of the weather teaches you stillness.

It asks you to stop, to notice, to hold. There are people who carry this kind of weather. You've met them.

You might be one of them. They don't smile like other people. They don't chatter when the silence is holy.

They walk slow because the world speaks soft. And if you listen close, you can hear it in the way they breathe. A hush lives inside them.

They are not prophets, not saints.

They are barometers of another kind.

They are kin to the land that grieves. They are witnesses.

When my granddaddy died, the trees on our property leaned in strange directions for months. Birds nested early and wrong. The soil got greedy with the rain and let nothing through.

It was as if the land had lost its interpreter. And maybe it had. I've tried since then to take up the work.

I carry his knife. I watch the angle of the shadows.

I listen to the breeze for lies.

But I'm not him.

I don't have his ear. Only his absence. And maybe that's enough.

The weight of the weather is what comes when a place remembers the truth, even if the people in it do not. It is the slow consequence of hidden wrongs.

The pressing hush before justice. The unbearable quiet of a story unspoken too long. You can ignore it, mock it, pave it, but you cannot erase it.

Because the sky remembers. And so does the ground. And the weather will carry the weight of what we refuse to.

Until we do.