The Weather

I have always been fascinated by the weather. When I attended Southern Illinois University - Carbondale, I used to drive my Mother crazy marveling about the massively disparate weather that one side of the state had compared to the other. When I would be walking home from class in just a sweater mid-February, while my family further north was shoveling out from three feet of snow, I would laugh and laugh. Until, of course, I stayed the whole summer in Carbondale. The humidity, which I thought I had a tolerance for, became stifling. Then, my Mother enjoying the milder, slightly less humid Chicago summers would better enjoy our conversation.

Still, though, the shift that 300 miles in a southern direction could bring was amazing to me. One winter when I drove home from Christmas break it was -30 in the city and just above 25 in De Soto. Of course, the sun had come out a little more, but still: 50 degree temperature difference between two places relatively close to each other on the map.

Now, in Chicago, the joke has always been that if you don't like the weather, you just have to wait. Within the space of a few hours it might go from windy and rainy to sunny and glorious. Generally, though, I have found this to be untrue. Because there is only minimal interference to the weather from the lake and the trade winds seem to behave in fairly predictable ways, the weather in Chicago tends to move in waves, with the temperature gradually moving up and down. The cloud cover and precipitation also tends to follow clearly mapped out behavioral patterns.

Here on the coast of Wales, this is just not the case, and I am having a devil of a time figuring out what to wear each day.

Last week Friday, I looked outside and there was the persistent drizzle that marks the coming of the Welsh winter, but it didn't feel too cold out. My computer suggested it would be about 60 degrees, so I went out in just a t-shirt and took off up the hill toward campus. I immediately regretted this decision. The air was warm, but the rain, despite being very light, was frigid. By the time I decided it would have been a good idea to wear a jacket, though, I was too far up the hill.

I decided then that I was not going to be fooled by weather readings: it was November, I should dress for November. The following Monday, the Monday if this past week, I looked out and saw the sky was covered in a dense layer of thick, gray, foreboding clouds. Again, my computer suggested that it might be around 60, but because the clouds suggested rain, I put on my winter coat and made my way up the hill. Within moments, I regretted this decision. The air was nearly humid, and definitely very warm. As I was climbing the hill, the sun came out, adding its warmth to the already warm air. Suffice it to say, I was a sweaty mess by the top of the hill, which made me look desperate during a meeting in which I needed to not look desperate and sweaty.

In short, the weather here is completely unpredictable. From the windows in the Arts Center, the entire town spreads out at the bottom of the hill, and the sea is easily seen. One need only sit there any day of the week between October and March to see the full panoply of weather sweep by. Today, for instance, it has rained, the wind kicked up a bit, the air temperature has fluctuated between comfortable and cold, and the clouds after alternately swept across the sky, bunched up into his dense masses, and then blown in-land never having dropped one ounce of rain.

The joke about Carbondale was that it was the town where Allergists went to die. Never in my life has I sneezed due to seasonal allergies until I moved to SIU. Having left there, I am similarly unafflicted. If there were a profession that came to die along the Cambrian Coast, it would be meteorologist. The weather for any one day is as unpredictable as, well...there is nothing that acts as chaotically as the weather here. Aberystwyth could be the new cliche for unpredictability.