The mood of rain.

Dawn awoke to a heavy ceiling of shadowed, disorganized clouds. They seemed to be jockeying for position rather than getting on with the business of letting loose their heavy cargo. The rest of us here on campus go about our business as if we don’t care.

But I think we do. Care. Or, maybe not care, but I think there is still something in us that sees this heavy blanket of clouds and expects rain. I think we are waiting for the shoe to drop, so-to-speak. Or water, obviously. Maybe it’s just because we have had so much rain this summer and into October that we can pretend that this is normal, these gray days that sometimes rain and sometimes just loiter. If the weather were more typical—and that’s getting harder to remember what that means—we’d be talking about the threat of rain on the way to classes. We’d be asking those who live in town and listen to the radio on their commute what it is supposed to do today.

But these days in this crazy time of climate change, strange weather is the fashion. We’ve given up. We can no longer rely on the habit of our clouds or the winds or the heat of the sun to behave predictably. The weather has a mind of its own, now.

These clouds, today…they are in a mood. They are the alcoholic parent we watch from the corner of our eye. They are the kids staying up way past bedtime teetering between euphoria and hysteria. They are the misunderstood student undecided whether to be cool or angry.

And we are the other people in the room, trying to act normal and undisturbed by what might come. We no longer challenge the expectation and raise our eyes to the cover of clouds searching our bones for some intuitive sense of when it will rain. We’ve lost that connection. We cannot afford to disturb the weather any more than it is disturbed on its own. We will leave the lawn chairs empty and let them stand vigil. Let them keep an eye on the mood of the rain.