Changes

From my office window I see bare ground, just after I finished reading a weather forecast that predicts a 98% chance of rain this afternoon.

What the hey?

Less than a week ago, I was shuffling through snow drifts, trying to reach the bird house so I could figure out how to prevent my flock from becoming duckcicles. I find that confusing.

A sidenote, I don’t like calling the small red building in the orchard a bird house. It was the chicken coop for many years, but now the chickens share it with ducks, and the ducks have been there long enough that it’s clear they’re no longer visiting but have an equal claim to the facility. So, no longer chicken coop but...bird house, fowl residence, home for creatures with feathers...it’s just not coming to me.

But that’s my problem. Our problem is that we live in a place with crazy weather.

A trauma I’ve written about several times and have never gotten over was at a meeting where I was seated next to a climatologist from Iowa State. When I told him where I lived, he got very excited and said, “Do you realize that where you live and the Ural Mountains in Siberia have the worst weather in the world?”

I had not known that and, truthfully, I didn’t need to know that.

I remember a conversation I had with one of my sisters when I was in my twenties. For some reason she asked where I’d like to live after I retired. I mentioned the Canadian Rockies, the Scottish Highlands, and overlooking a Norwegian fjord. She looked a little dubious and said, “I dunno, you’ve listed all really cold places.”

I didn’t understand her point. At the time I was about twenty-six. We heated our house with wood. Every fall I’d cut up about a bazillion dead trees, split the chunks with an ax, fill half our basement with nicely stacked firewood and then all winter long make three or four trips up and down the basement stairs carrying armloads of wood.

To make it worse, I basically did it for the fun of it – I don’t think we saved that much money. And that was just in the winter. For many years, we had nothing resembling air conditioning. Then we got one window unit to put in our bedroom, which meant during hot streaks we’d have sullen children sleeping on the floor. This was because I had subscribed to the theory that if you work in the sun, the shade is good enough.

Time has proven to me that it’s a stupid theory.

After we stopped wasting money on raising and educating children, we put in central air conditioning and a high efficiency furnace. Now, as long as civilization doesn’t fall and we keep paying our bills, we’re more or less indifferent to the world outside. Unless, of course, we need to leave the house. And right now, outside is in the midst of an eighty-degree temperature swing - in less than a week.

This isn’t something human beings should need to deal with. Particularly not old ones.

One of the things I like to do to torture myself when just reading the daily paper isn’t enough, is to check out real estate in more reasonable parts of the world. For instance, I found a lovely villa in the Caribbean where the average high for the year is 80 and the average low is 75. And it’s like that year-round. Not a fan of sunshine or hurricanes? Well, Tasmania has a temperature range of 40 to 70. IN A YEAR! We can manage that in an hour and a half.

Oh, well. No earthquakes, hurricanes or volcanos. Just keep repeating that.

Over and over.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olson