GRAFTON — When I moved to Vermont in December of 1999, I felt a twinge of trepidation.
Although I find beauty in every season, I love the big bloom of summer best: the heat and light and wide open windows and the whirr of ceiling fans. I like sweating in the barn and the luxury of letting the garden tell me what to make for dinner.
I'd visited Vermont often enough in winter to know it was no-fooling-around cold. I'd come in mud season, too, slogging into camps in Jeffersonville and Westford, making sport of the journey, seeing how far I could travel before my boots got sucked off my feet.
Did I have sufficient vigor to be a full-time resident? My Magic 8-Ball said, “The outlook is cloudy.” But if you want to live in a habitat sparsely settled by humans, you gotta go where the weather is, and you can't be whining when you get there.
* * *
Friends from my home turf in Chester County, Pa., knew I had an essentially tropical soul. When I announced my departure, they thought I'd taken leave of my senses.
But the turf had gotten crowded with new neighbors who appeared to shun the weather and all of nature. In the pricey developments that surrounded my small house on three secluded acres, the only visible signs of human life were the “lawn doctors” dousing the preternaturally green grass with chemicals and the professional landscapers whizzing around on huge, buzzing mowers.
The citified meteorologists, broadcasting from windowless studios in Philadelphia, sounded as though they hated weather. In the midst of prolonged droughts they reported the likelihood of rain apologetically, as if it were a curse.
“It's going to be a gloomy day. A 100-percent chance of rain,” they intoned, looking far gloomier than the day.
Meanwhile, the few remaining farmers in the county were gathered before dawn at the local coffee joint, raising their cups to the sky.
* * *
My father occasionally referred to people who lived inside lives as “hothouse flowers.” The new hothouse flowers did emerge from their houses to attend township meetings, where they protested the “stench” of the few dairy farms left standing. They lodged complaints against their neighbors who had the foresight to plant native species and wildflower meadows in their yards.
One April, they raised a fracas about the “noise” of the peeper frogs, those musical inhabitants of wetlands who herald the arrival of spring with their gorgeous choruses. What were the elected officials expected to do? Pave the wetlands? Arrest the peepers?
This news was reported in the local paper. The next week, three pages of letters to the editor defended the peepers' right to life and song. One writer asked, “When you handcuff a frog, do you cuff him in front of his back or behind it?”
These missives gave me heart, but not enough to stay.
* * *
Much to my dismay, there are hothouse flowers in Vermont. A few Decembers back, an ice storm knocked out power on our road for three days. I drove into Chester, where power had already been restored, and I overheard a young woman talking to a shopkeeper.
“I couldn't take a shower for 24 hours, and there was no TV,” she mewled.
The shopkeeper murmured sympathetically. I sealed a piece of metaphorical duct tape over my lips.
Ask anyone who makes a living out in the weather how they are, and they're likely to say, “No use complaining.” Farmers, farriers, veterinarians, loggers, utility crews - the men and women who have reason to complain, don't.
In an unusually wet spring, you might hear a farmer fret about getting his hay in, but he doesn't take the rain as a personal affront, as if the weather had set out to ruin his life.
Before I moved to Vermont I exercised racehorses six mornings a week. I rode with stellar riders. We sweltered in the humid summers. We shivered in the damp winters despite being bundled in layers of fleece, wool, and down. When it rained, our hands slipped on the reins while the horses pulled our arms out of their sockets.
A racehorse doesn't care if the rider is cold, wet, tired, hung over, or heartbroken. She or he just wants to gallop forward. The rider's job is to persuade the horse to gallop at the prescribed pace, using finesse and, sometimes, an equal measure of muscle.
Riders never whined. It was an unspoken rule in the code of riders' conduct. We got on our horses and rode.
* * *
A couple of weeks ago, a n'oreaster blew through Vermont. That morning I was in the barn mucking stalls, and the rain was music on the metal roof. Wind propelled warm air through the open doors. The sky was the shade of gray that only nature can paint on clouds, doves, and kittens.
The summer had been too dry. The ground was hard and the grass was brown. My neighbors' well dried up. When the earth is parched, I feel parched, too. No matter how much water I drink, I can't get enough moisture. I feel edgy, out of balance. The rain was restorative, a reason for celebration.
As I hauled a muck tub out to the manure pile, I felt grateful I didn't have six bumptious horses to gallop. I remembered one of my favorite literary characters - the Whether Man in Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. When he meets Milo, the young protagonist, the Whether Man asks Milo, “Do you think it will rain?”
“'I thought you were the Weather Man,' said Milo, very confused.
“'Oh, no,' said the little man. 'I'm the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all, it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.'”
I stopped, tilted my head upward and let the rain fall on my face. It was more soothing than a day at the spa.
* * *
Later that morning, back at my desk, barn chores and the day's writing done, I opened my e-mail. A friend from “away” was visiting in Danby, entertaining the idea of moving there. We had tentatively planned to meet for lunch.
“Sorry I didn't get back to you,” she wrote. “The weather is godawful.”
Two months earlier, she'd been lamenting the lack of rain. Were we living and breathing under the same sky?
There will be weather, I thought, contemplating the odds of her surviving a January n'oreaster, snow blowing and drifting and temperatures below zero.
Humans are a contentious species. We hate what is foreign to us. We shun it or kill it or try to. Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American Baptist minister born in 1878, said, “Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.” Hating the weather is equally destructive.