Climatology

Microburst. 

Winds may reach one hundred miles per hour and can pose a threat to life and property.

She was four years old, came home from the pool with her mother. The lifeguards had received weather warnings, sent everyone away, rolled the gates closed. During the short ride, a friendly patter of raindrops had given way to a fierce deluge. The windshield wipers swished back and forth at top speed, but everything outside of the car was obscured, was water. By the time they made it to their red brick house on a dizzyingly steep street, the sky was an angry percussion, was a spill of black. Inside, her mother dashed about, closing windows. Then, the microburst, the front and back doors flailing on their hinges, the day gone dark. The girl in the center hallway, screaming.

*

Heat Lightning.

It is also known as silent lightning and dry lightning.

In the summer sky. In the summer sky, in the mountains. At night. Below: a girl, a lake house, a dock. Her parents are divorcing. She’s applying to college. Her boyfriend won’t return her letters. It’s dark. Inside, her father and aunt and cousins are asleep. Below her feet—wooden boards, water, and more sleep. The fish are asleep. And the freshwater mussels. Sand is their bed, a thin silty layer of rotting leaves their blanket. The freshwater seaweed, swaying in the gentle current, also sleeps. The woods behind her are very much awake. Bears lumber. Bobcats prowl. Mushrooms bloom from the meat of dead pine. The trees arch ever skyward, their branches holding wakeful, wide-eyed owls. Above it all, heat lightning flashes, turning the sky lilac, then a deep, muddy grey. The girl pads back to the house. Along the flagstone path, onto the porch, through the house, and up to her bedroom. Her window is open wide to the sounds of the woods and the bright pulses in the sky. She turns out her light but does not sleep.

*

Tropopause.

We live in the troposphere. Above that is the stratosphere. The tropopause is the boundary between the two.

The family, together in its new form, in a new faction. The girl, her father, the steps: -mother, -sister, -brother, -cousin. The family, on a trip. They climbed to the Parthenon, ate al fresco souvlaki, sailed to Paros, tasted seaside goatfish. Now they are flying back home. Will land in under an hour, are still over the ocean. The girl’s cup of wine is suddenly floating in front of her face. Her father’s skull is connecting, loudly, with the overhead luggage compartment. Her stepmother is gripping her arm. A moment later, the pilot explains: clear air turbulence. The worst injury: a flight attendant with a dislocated shoulder. The family, brought closer by this trip-of-a-lifetime, now galvanized by life-flashing-before-our-eyes. 

*

Thundersnow.

An uncommon occurrence.

The girl, not a girl anymore. In her thirties. In her own home. Her own family. Husband. Dog. A child, currently the size of a rutabaga, growing in her womb. It’s deep winter, the snow is bright white on the lawn, sifting down from the clouds—bales of grey wool above. Downstairs, a fire burns in the hearth and chases away the chill. And then the dog, tucked into the couch, begins to howl. The howl starts low in his chest, travels up through his powerful neck, and ends in a mournful, pained whistle. It’s a sound reserved for summer, for fireworks and electrical storms. The woman is upstairs. The sweater that she’s just folded fits in her palm. She tucks it into a drawer with the others and hurries down to comfort her dear beast. On the third step from the bottom, her sock slips on the wood. She completes her descent on her back, one leg twisted at a sickening angle.

Later, recovering in bed, a silver cane with a taupe plastic grip propped nearby—the rutabaga safely clutched inside—she will learn a new word, thundersnow.

*

Dew Point. 

It’s a temperature, really. Air cools and becomes saturated with water vapor which collects, most notably, on flora.

She becomes a mother during a steady, slow, week-long rainstorm. Laboring for nearly two days before the child is presented—grey and rubbery on the woman’s chest. Then, a breath, a pinking, and not a cry but a coo. The rain finally stops. The baby, a girl, needs extra care, needs to sleep in a box of light, must stay in the hospital for a few days. The woman, the mother, only goes home to shower, to lie down for flits of sleep. Very early each morning, before going to the room of nurses and the smallest babies, she and her husband walk the dog. The world fresh, each blade of grass wet with newness.

*

Twister. 

Cyclone. Tornado. Whirlwind.

The woman dreams of the plains states. Of sirens that wail warnings mere seconds before the funnel descends. Her daughter, asleep in the bassinet, close enough to share breath, dreams of something else.

*

Isobar.

Two places, marked on a map. Two places with identical atmospheric pressure. The isobar is the line drawn between.

First, umbilical. That severed, something else. First, blood to blood. Then, milk to mouth. Later, language. The end touches the beginning touches the end, and so on.

*

Climate Cycle

Oscillation. Pattern. Recurrences.

The daughter is born with all of the egg cells she will ever have. Shortly before birth, then, the mother carries the eggs that might become her grandchildren. Harkening back, the mother herself was once an egg carried inside of her mother, carried inside of her grandmother. Backwards and forwards, forever. Patterns that span 800,000 years. More. Through trillions of microbursts and thundersnows and twisters. Observed always by the hovering tropopause, intermittently lit by heat lightning. What is has come before, ever with a difference. Every dew point a new dawn, every isobar in flux.

Diane Goettel is the Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press. Her writing has recently appeared in Club Plum, Ethel, Border Crossings, Grimoire, and The Laurel Review. She lives in Mt. Vernon, New York with her family.