WHEN I STARTED using the weather as a tool for coziness, climate change wasn’t a topical issue. A rainy day was an opportunity for reflection, organization inside the home, cooking, reading, doing puzzles, paying bills, responding to letters, raincoats, and puddles to send your kids to jump into—and for a writer, rainy days are a ticket to ride.
Now the weather, once seen as mundane, is political—and, with alarming regularity, dangerous. I don’t want to trigger anyone, and I feel that I may. However, weather, no matter who you are or where you live, has a towering, surrounding impact on your day. We all look to the weather—it dictates mood, determines what we wear, what activities we do, how people interact, our perspective, what we eat, how we walk down the street to work. Talking about the weather is a tried-and-true hammock for conversation—one can fall back on it and relax, knowing that everybody will have something to contribute.
Climate is a touchstone. I think of people the world over shuffling to the window first thing to look at the sky. After cold winters, I love how New Yorkers aggressively wear open-toed shoes and shorts on the first warm day of spring. There is a weather channel! The weather ties us, like when you make eye contact with a stranger as you both try to jump over the same moat-like puddle to cross the street, you almost want to hold hands. My phone displays the weather in all the places where people I love live, and every morning, before I’ve left the sheets, I scroll through each town to see temperatures and precipitation. Even if I don’t speak to the person, I imagine the sweater they will be wearing, wonder if they will go swimming, have a little worry if they might be driving on icy highways.
For me, the words “apparently, it’s going to rain all day” convert in my brain to an Emma Thompson–like voice saying, Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay. Even though all the research I can find says that, scientifically, light and sun make you feel better, the opposite is true for me. I chose to move from California back to New York in the 1990s because of the lack of rainy days; it was never even overcast.
This Sunday morning, it’s raining, and for the first time I know of, my husband asked Alexa to play Joni Mitchell. (Alexa is the machine we have in the kitchen—I use it for spelling when I write, Alexa, how do you spell “psychology”? Alexa, how do you spell “calendar”? She gets it right every time.) One of our teenage kids got her schoolwork and climbed into the corner of the sofa to read. I just saw her arm float up to switch on the lamp over her head. If it were a sunny day, I would bark at her to go sit at a table to do homework, but since it’s raining I let it go—much more engaging to be in the corner when it’s gray and wet out. The dogs sleep heavier, the lilies I bought in the middle of the week emit an entrenched, intoxicating fragrance, and the sound of the water hitting the tin roof next door can sometimes be as exciting as Christmas morning. Lots of the coziness comes from being in from out in the rain. “In” is quite a lucky place to be, whether it’s your own home, a coffee shop, a classroom, a barn. When you are aware of shelter, there is most often gratitude that comes along with it.
A friend of mine says she finds coziness in Central America. The balmy zephyrs, crashing waves, and canopies of the rain forests are cozy to her. It never occurred to me that tropical climates could be cozy, as I have spent so little time in them, but of course they are. This brings me back to the foundation of this book: coziness can’t be defined by one standard; it only aligns with what is inside of us. What we know, what we love, what we feel connected to and familiar with. Just the other day, I heard a scientist from Antarctica calling into a New York radio station. Naturally he didn’t grow up there, but has worked on the southernmost continent for his adult life. As he described his observations and studies of the tundra’s dry winds and deafening cold, it sounded like he was describing the coziest place on earth—Antarctica! When you feel emotion and sense of place from someone, it’s because they believe it.
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IT’S THE PITS writing about singing in the rain or walking in sunshine when the climate has been so hard on the world. Or how hard we humans have been on the climate. I want to write about scurrying arm in arm with a pal under an umbrella, but flooding, fires, winds, and soaring or plummeting temperatures the globe over have destroyed so many lives, it’s hard to.
But perhaps the connections made during extreme weather are where the hard-fought coziness is unearthed. Think of the relief work, heroic stories of citizens being clever and brave and doing the right thing. Like the bakers in Houston who got shut in their shop for two days while Hurricane Harvey raged. The bakery was unaffected by water, so the guys, even though they had no idea about their own safety, or the safety of their loved ones and city, had brilliant foresight that food would be needed, and what did they have? Flour and ovens. They got to work and baked bolillos and pan dulce—over five thousand pieces of bread to feed the neighborhood when the storm subsided. There was a businessman, “Mattress Mack,” who owns a massive chain of stores in Houston. He opened all of them to victims of the hurricane, and he himself drove the dinosaur-sized trucks used for deliveries to comb the streets looking for people in distress. The managers of his stores gave weary, overextended first responders brand-new, top-of-the-line Tempur-Pedic beds for much-needed collapse and rest.
In the unusually mild autumn New York City had that year, the hurricanes hitting Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the islands of the Caribbean had all of us worried but were far away. I chose to donate money and then cook for my kids, who were starting their school year, and clean closets to ease my fear for our country. On the radio, which was continuously playing, the strongest voices coming through were those of the national guardspeople, firefighters, first responders, government officials, and citizens: “We’re all in this together.”