THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE continued
Katherine Smith
Kate Smith is the clinical herbalist and health
coach of Made Whole. She grew up in the
bamboo forests of Pinebluff, and is back in
the Sandhills after a decade living in Alaska,
Ireland, and Appalachia.
Through
The
Grapevine
All things Natural Living
THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE continued
April Showers
by Katherine Smith
We call it small talk—comments on the
weather. “How about this rain,” we rhetorically
muse, keeping it light. While weather talk is not
the most inspiring prompt, it probably is the
most intuitive. In the century of personalized
loneliness, we arm ourselves with the torch
of our handheld tech to navigate interactions
with the human beings we know less and less.
But the weather always unites us. Weather
makes us siblings of the same mother who
forces us to share hurricanes, heat waves and
ice storms so edifyingly, and for now, mostly
out of our modern control. Weather plays with
our trick joints, wipes out the bread and milk
aisles, plans our weddings, lives in our hair
and on the backs of our necks.
In spring, it goes plainly by rain. Our landbased
ancestors knew it well and gave it
qualifiers. Hen-Scartins, from north England’s
dialect, are the “chicken scratches” of long,
thin cloud streaks that forecast rain. Bengy,
an old southeast English word derived from
something like “to binge,” is an overcast and
threatening sky. “Hunch-weather,” an 18th
century classification, is often the result of
both. And just for us Southerners, there’s
a special adjective — swullocking, the old
southeast English word meaning “sultry” or
“humid,” and bringing a decent thunderstorm.
With rain comes the metallic smell of
ozone, a molecule formed from the interaction
of electrical discharges, such as lightening,
meeting oxygen. It rises from hot rock and
dry earth, releasing the aromatic molecules of
what it touches along with geosmin, a bacterial
byproduct. In the 1964 journal Nature, its
smell was named as petrichor—a fusion of the
Greek words petra, meaning rock, and ikhor,
the blood of the gods in Greek mythology. In
the American South, it comes off as a smell
Thomas Wolfe called “clean but funky.”
After the aroma comes the rainbow—the
sign of promise between what we are and what
we imagine. Here in the Bible Belt, we are
well familiar with rain’s mythos. It’s baptism,
symbolizing a dormant self brought to life
when covered by water. It’s the great flood
that annihilated all but that which brought
hope and integrity to a new generation. It’s
the “latter rain,” a Biblical symbol for the final
outpouring of the Holy Spirit in corporate
spiritual experience. Regardless of religion,
most cultures imprint rain with the symbol of
spiritual renewal; the divine seed of potential
between sky and earth.
But, as poet John Keats complained,
science and philosophy have been employed
to “clip an Angel’s wings” and “unweave
a rainbow” since Issac Newton explained
sunlight refraction in 1704. And now, we
not only can explain rain, we can control
it. The 1946 invention of cloud seeding by
airplanes and jets fills clouds with silver
iodide, which attracts ice crystals in the cloud
until it becomes so heavy that it releases rain
or snow. Stratospheric aerosol injections
create clouds to cool and shade the planet,
and marine cloud brightening lightens,
whitens, and makes more reflective the
clouds over the ocean. Coincidentally, along
with environmental aims, geoengineering
techniques are also being employed to make
THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE con't. next column THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE con't. next column
our lives more comfortable. Companies now
offer cloud bursting services for wedding days.
Who will we be, absent of this unpredictable
bondage? Weather is the etheric power above
us in the food chain, keeping us humble while
uniting us. Our choice small talk may soon
become anachronistic—a voice of time past
when we still felt small.
“Forever, by day and night, I give back life
to my own origin,” Walt Whitman once heard
the rain say. While we still have a thread of its
capricious mystery, may we also listen to it.
And when our bodies are filled with the sound
of sustenance, may we meet our neighbors
beneath umbrellas and exclaim, “How about
this rain?” ☐
No. 142 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.33
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