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| My husband Jeff enjoying the weather on our deck in a photo taken a few years ago. It's our wedding anniversary today, and I'm celebrating the fact he's tolerated my weather obsession all these years. |
By extension, I'm also thanking all the spouses and partners of meteorologists and weather enthusiasts out there for supporting or at least putting up with all that weather talk,
My husband Jeff has tolerated the combination of ADHD and weather obsession for so long now, and he still finds it in himself to stay cheerful.
We might be talking about, say, whether we need to put our dog Jackson in the kennel when we're away the following weekend, then, SQUIRREL!!!!!
Thunder rumbles in the distance. My favorite kind of weather! Do I go to the window? Is it a big storm? Do I get in the truck and chase the storm down for photos and video? Off I go, leaving Jeff wondering about dinner. And probably a lot of other things.
Or, at night, Jeff's trying to watch "Death In Paradise," or one of those other murder mystery shows he likes. I'm sitting on the couch, scrolling social media because there's an impressive tornado outbreak going on in Texas.
Storm chasers are posting amazing photos and short videos of the twisters. So every five seconds, I push the phone in his face to share how gobsmacked I am by the photo of the tornado sending an entire barn into oblivion. Which means Jeff never does learn who killed the book author on that night's episode of "Death In Paradise."
Jeff respects science, but he is not a scientist. Somehow, however, he survives my detailed explanations of a Quasi-Linear Convective Systems and baroclinic zones without fully allowing me to see how badly his eyes are glazing over.
Jeff is a scenic set designer and a painter. He likes doing things big, so he's produced some marvelous large paintings.
Years ago, we were all sick and tired of this huge ugly painting of an owl that was gradually falling apart on my mother's living room wall.
As a gift, he produced this wonderful large painting of what appeared to be a park in September. A few of the trees in the landscape were starting to turn color, but most were still green. He created a blue sky with beautiful puffy clouds and he made the atmosphere look a bit hazy. Just a stunning piece of art.
And how did I react to this work? I gave a weather synopsis of what's going on in the painting. I concluded it was a warm, and somewhat humid September day, and a cold front was approaching that would give us the first taste of real autumn chill in the next couple of days.
Yeah, I came up with that whole weather forecast. About a painting. Jeff just said, "Yes, dear."
The good news, of course is that my mother loved that painting for years until she passed away in 2022.
I also always congratulate Jeff on the accuracy of his clouds within his paintings. He likes to include expanses of sky in his landscapes. The clouds in his paintings all look plausible. They could happen in real life.
Which is great, because it drives me crazy to see some paintings that includes clouds that are meteorologically impossible. Yeah, Jeff has to tolerate that obsession, too. But maybe there's a bit of a closet weather geek within him, since he knows what clouds look like and sort of how they form.
Jeff does seem to like the gardens I've created around our house, which of course are weather dependent. He's gotten interested in how the weather helps or hurts the perennial gardens. So maybe a little of me rubbed off on him, who knows?
So, we have had 11 years of marriage through literally all kinds of weather, and we were together a couple years before we married.
I think the weather gods are smiling on our marriage, too. From day one, actually. Our wedding day was gorgeous. Obsessed as I am, I looked up the specifics this morning. The high that day, August 26, 2012 was 87, the low was 68 and it was mostly sunny and just a bit hazy, like in Jeff's paintings.
They say that marriage is a path of enduring sunny bliss interrupted by the occasional storm. With Jeff, all my storm chasing seems to be actual, meteorological storms. He never creates metaphorical ones in our lives, another thing that makes me eternally grateful for Jeff.
Here's one forecast I know will be accurate: A happy anniversary warning is in effect for Jeff. There's a 100 percent chance that I will always love him as intensely as I ever have if not more. The love raining down will mix with, laughter, respect, awe and pride toward the man I married. Accumulations of happy memories with him will be deep.
The "weather pattern" that is the my joy of being married to Jeff will never change. Happy Anniversary, Chief!
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