Weather is more than a metaphor for life.

People who try to forecast rain, snow,

fog and sunshine with barometers, data

from ocean buoys, thermometers, and

now satellites  are at a loss to explain

how my step-grandfather Napoleon who

smoked Old Golds and loved to watch Texas

wrestling (the ring had barbed wire and not

ropes) on my grandmother’s black and

white TV could forecast the weather.

Although he had been in America

most of his life, he still had problems with

English.  He addressed my older sister

with “bright eyes cut-cut.”  Cut-cut was his

name for baby chicks, I think.  Still, when

asked about the weather tomorrow, he

always took our question seriously and

looking away from his match in a time

before instant replay, he would flex his

left elbow and perhaps lift his left leg

for a twitch in his knee.  Then he would

report “no rain, but storm coming soon.”

I believed him at five, didn’t believe him 

for years and years, but now at seventy

I believe him with all my heart again.

FG   7/19/2015

Robert Frost:  All metaphors fail at some point.  The poet’s job is not to comment, but be pleased.

Napoleon Guimond and my Nana lived on the second floor on Spring Street before my father built my sister and me bedrooms off the breezeway.  For a season or so we shared a bedroom off the TV room in my Nana’s world.