Learning My Mother's Language

Lee Snyder

It is said that remembering is an act of the imagination, and I have no reason to doubt it. I have come to understand that memory’s intuition offers a truth of its own, enlarging and extending life in some inexplicable way. At least that is the case in my relationship with my mother and our complicated patterns of communication.

On one level, we shared an easy camaraderie, an unprovoked and respectful form of exchange based on the ordinary interests of Mennonite farm women. We kept track of things, exchanged gossip, commented on church and family news, and noted the passage of time through deaths, births, and community tragedies.

Even as an adult, I found it difficult to shuck the daughter role. I did not need to, nor did I want to. After my dad died, when my mother would travel from Oregon to visit us in Ohio or Virginia, I would wonder fleetingly if there was the possibility of a new conversation, more intimate, outside the worn grooves of familiar roles. In our community the women kept their inner lives private. None of this modern day mother-daughter psychologizing where disappointments are aired or long buried hurts are hurled at one another.

There was another level of communication, however, that was so pervasively obvious that for years I was not attuned to its significance. I remember it only as my mother’s preoccupation with the weather. This was not simply a matter of passing interest or the topic of casual conversation. For her, the weather was more like a beloved reassuring presence. 

Not having TV, our family did not have the ubiquitous weather channel to signal the week’s forecast. The radio announcer kept us periodically informed of the temperature and the measure of rainfall, but it was the barometer that was given a favored place in our house. There the mysterious black box with its three instrument panels sat on the fireplace mantel beside the dark wood-encased chime clock which called out the hours and the half hours.

Sometimes during the day, when my mother would sense a subtle atmospheric shift, she would check the barometer and announce, “The barometer’s up.” Or, “The barometer’s down.” My father would tap the device just before bedtime, preparing for whatever weather change would order the next day’s work. I never did understand the barometer’s pressure gauges or how the floating hands of the meters conveyed weather information, but they made perfect sense to my mom and dad.

My mother seemed to possess an expanded sense of weather, as something beyond the ordinary, an expression of both an inner and outer state of being. I have learned from my mother to see and feel, to hear and fear the weather. To hope and marvel, to taste and touch the wind or the sharp edge of a March morning. I can still see Mom bracing herself against the gusts, hanging out the bath towels and the overalls on the backyard clothesline next to the grape arbor.

When each Saturday I call my mother, now in her nineties, in the retirement village, she asks, “What’s the weather like there?” We exchange reports on an infinite variety of weather manifestations and shifts—interminable rain, a heavy freeze, the warm fog, the first snowfall. Or it might be the Shenandoah’s fall blaze and Oregon’s extended Indian summer. “It was forty degrees this morning,” she says, or fifty or maybe sixty-three. 

Some days she takes a walk, depending on the weather. I imagine her bundled in a favorite ratty brown sweater, hunched against the wind as she follows the sidewalk around Quail Run. (I know she has gotten rid of that sweater by this time, but I indulge the memory of her hanging on to worn dresses, old jackets and sagging coats, because that is my own tendency.)

My mother’s letters over the years, when she still found pleasure in writing and before Parkinson’s frustrated her worn and nimble hands, have always revealed two things: her faith and her love for the rhythms of the year. “Greetings in Jesus’ name,” her letters would begin. Then she would move into an account of the week’s activities: the boys fertilizing the field, planting the garden, spraying, windrowing, harvesting. 

After heavy spring rains, she would report that the creek was up—or down. Sometimes she would register a strong north wind or “skiff” of snow. There was something comforting about her litany of duties: raking, cutting out quilt blocks for the women’s sewing circle, going to Wednesday night prayer meeting, mowing the yard and orchard. But always there was the weather. “It’s dry,” she would write. “The farmers really need rain.” Or, just as often, “The fields are so wet the boys can’t get in to cut the fescue.”

While still on the farm, she used to write about February daffodils, which bloomed in their wildness along the fence rows or in the ditches along the road and about the early camellias outside the dining room window. This was the prize Floribunda, I would remember, an astonishingly large pink specimen which served as a harbinger of spring. “I picked a bouquet of daffodils where the old shed used to be,” Mom would write, and I pictured exactly where she had gathered them.

Even with experience and a keen eye for reading the skies, my mother acknowledged—perhaps longed for—the unpredictable and disruptive chaos of weather which served as a manifestation of life itself. Omni-present, the weather was a force to be reckoned with.
She knew this without ever having heard of weather modeling, chaos theory, and Edward Lorenz’s question, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” She would have opted to observe cloud patterns and sunsets firsthand rather than consider theories of whether the Butterfly Effect magnifies small uncertainties into large-scale weather phenomena.

Weather was more than just a daily companion, however. It took me a long time to understand that weather is code language for my mother. I am still learning the language, but I know when she asks me, “How’s the weather?” that she is really asking, “How are you doing?” “Are you okay?” As a farm woman inextricably linked to the land, Mom’s sense of order and change, of possibility and wonder, is expressed through the language of weather.

Some Saturdays I press her, “And how are you, Mom?” “Oh, about the same,” she replies, adding more only if I insist. And so we talk about the weather, which gives us permission to address the soul while acknowledging chaos and predictability, mystery and surprise, expectations of the moment—and hopes for tomorrow.
—Lee Snyder was dean at Eastern Mennonite University and president of Bluffton University. She continues to work with educational organizations, boards, and the church. She and her husband divide their time between Virginia and Oregon. This article is excerpted from At Powerline and Diamond Hill: Unexpected Intersections of Life and Work (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2010).