Posted on 11/04/2003 12:33:55 PM PST by ancientart
At 14, I worked in my friend's dad's thrift shop. I made less than minimum wage for cleaning bathrooms and taking inventory.
The work wasn't glamorous, but I learned to save.
My dream was to build a weather station.
I devoured meteorology books, and weather equipment catalogs. My grandma gave me a barometer that measured pressure in millibars, and a hygrometer for humidity readings.
I saved for an indoor-outdoor thermometer and an anemometer, a device to measure wind speed. I finally saved enough for a hand-held anemometer, a plastic tube with a Styrofoam ball inside. The faster the wind, the higher the ball floated.
With all my equipment, I could forecast weather, though not nearly as well as Tom Duhain, the dreamy Channel 3 meteorologist I was secretly in love with.
The problem with the hand-held anemometer was that I had to know which way the wind was blowing to use it.
One birthday, my parents bought me a weather vane: black, iron, topped with a running horse. I loved it!
When I went to college I left the weather vane behind. Couldn't use it in the dorms.
Later, when I married (not Tom Duhain) and moved out, I took the weather vane along.
My husband Art and I lived first in an apartment (no place for weather vane), then a summer basement (no vane), a quad-plex (no vane), an apartment (no vane), Art's parents' house, (vane packed in box in garage), apartment (no vane), two more apartments (no vane), two rented houses in Aberdeen (vane still packed away) and finally to a house of our own.
We quickly erected my weather vane on the garage roof, where I could see it from the bedroom window. On the roof, Art carefully aligned the vane so that north was north and east was east.
I stood and stared that day with intense satisfaction. The satisfaction returned each time I looked out the window - until a storm ruined my dream.
The morning after, north was no longer north but east-southeast.
Art (the non-meteorologist) wasn't about to re-fasten the vane each time the wind blew, and I wasn't going to climb the roof pregnant. So it remained askew.
For 12 years, north remained east-southeast!
The neighbors must have wondered what the point was of having an inaccurate weather vane.
The point was, it was my weather vane and my dream. I'd waited a long time to look out and see it turn in the wind.
Still, it annoyed me each time I saw it boldly announcing that north was east-southeast.
There was just a twinge of irritation each time I gazed up at it, but not enough of a twinge to make climbing the garage roof worthwhile.
I know others with messed-up vanes. Like me, they never bother to return to the roof and nail it down right. It might just slip again an hour later. So why exert yourself? It is much easier to sit back and laugh at those who try to keep their vanes pointing north.
Those with wildly erring vanes find nothing more amusing than someone with a good, long history of weather vane accuracy after a storm shifts their north by a few degrees. They will point and laugh for hours.
When a vane on a tall or prominent building shifts slightly, it provides no end of pleasure. And nothing is so annoying to them than a perfectly reliable vane.
Until every last vane points the wrong direction, these vane critics will be unsatisfied.
This month, a kind man named Al reshingled our garage roof. Without even being asked, he remounted the weather vane and fastened it down tight, with north pointing north.
So far, it remains true, even in strong winds. If it ever shifts, I'm probably in for ridicule when I climb onto the garage to nail it down, but there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of seeing that horse really face north to meet the wind when it charges down from the Arctic Circle.
Now that we have arrived in the 21st Century, the technology exists to fasten things securely.
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