On fall leaves and variable weather

Watching folks clearing the fall leaves has set me to thinking about a profound matter: how differently fall leaves are managed in different locales. This may seems trivial, but bear with me a minute.

A brief prelude: After living for many (many!) years in Colorado, we moved around a lot, living in five states in the space of 6 years. That experience was really enlightening in many ways. One of the things I learned is captured in the saga of fall leaves.

As a kid growing up in Colorado, I learned what to do with fall leaves: you rake them up, bag them, and take them someplace. When we moved to New England, I was met with curious stares when I asked where bagged leaves should be deposited. I learned to rake them into the woods. When I asked friends in Michigan how folks dealt with leaves, I was met with the same curious stare. I learned to rake them into the gutter, where some truck would scoop them up. In each place, folks were dumbfounded by my question because they couldn’t get what was so hard to understand. It was incomprehensible that anyone would not know what to do with fall leaves. To them, it was so obvious. It was unimaginable that there might be several possible ways to deal with leaves.

The message, of course, is not just about leaves. We have regional “knowledge” (just as we have personal knowledge) that is totally taken as given. It’s not that your everyday New Englander, Michigander, or Coloradan has considered a variety of options and concluded that this is the best way to handle fall leaves. No. Options other than the familiar one, the one that seems so self-evident, are simply not considered—or even imagined. Maybe you’ve heard the saying that a fish doesn’t know it’s wet. We are all that fish.

A variation on this theme: My parents lived in Louisiana for a few years. Once, they were telling friends there about a road that had washed out in Colorado. “Why don’t they just put in a shell road?” their friends asked. Their friends were totally clueless that their suggestion was based on assumptions that would make sense in Louisiana but were meaningless in the land-locked high dessert that is Colorado.

The second intriguing observation from these travels was about how folks understand the weather. In this case, people everywhere did something virtually exactly alike, but in each locale, folks thought it was original to them. So, wherever we lived, we heard people saying, “You know what they say about weather in ________ (fill in the present location). If you don’t like it, wait around a few minutes. It’ll change.” I’d heard that my whole lifetime in Colorado, and I took it to be a clever—and accurate—commentary on Colorado’s variable weather. Then I heard it in New Hampshire. And in Massachusetts. And in Michigan. And even in San Francisco. In each place, folks thought, as I had, that it was a witty, and accurate, description of their own weather. It was an announcement of how special their weather was: “Unlike weather in other places, our weather changes all the time!” 

Now, I’m not sure what the message is here. This pronouncement might be common because the weather truly is variable, everywhere. But why do we all make it about our own location? “You know what they say about the weather here…” Maybe it speaks to everyone’s need to feel special. If we live in a place that’s special, where the weather is remarkably variable, then aren’t we a little special? Or maybe it’s another version of local “truths.” Maybe I became convinced that Colorado’s weather is unusual in its variability. Maybe I never consider other possible understandings of the world—like that the weather is variable everywhere.

I’m still working on what I can learn from this one. But it strikes me as fascinating anyway, sort of like the unique variability of Colorado’s weather.