Weather in the Body

There is a kind of forecasting that needs no instrument and no app, and the people who practice it are mostly old, and mostly right, and mostly ignored by everyone younger. My grandmother could tell you, on a clear bright morning with not a cloud in the sky, that it would rain by evening, and she was not guessing, and she was not reading the barometer, because she did not own one. She was reading her own body — a particular ache in a particular joint, an old wrist that had been broken decades before and had appointed itself, ever since, the family’s weather station. It’s coming, she’d say, flexing the wrist, and the young would smile at each other, and by evening it would be raining. Every family has one of these people, or had one: the aunt whose hip knows, the grandfather whose old war injury throbs before a front, the person who feels the weather in their body before the sky admits to anything.

The young dismiss it, and I dismissed it too, filing it under superstition, the same drawer as knocking wood and reading tea leaves — a charming old folk belief, a coincidence dressed up as knowledge, the sort of thing old people say. And I was wrong, and it is worth being precise about how I was wrong, because the correction is more interesting than the dismissal. The aches are real, and the mechanism is real: falling barometric pressure, which precedes most bad weather, genuinely changes the pressure balance in the body’s joints, and in tissue that has been damaged — an old break, a bad hip, scarred and arthritic ground — that change registers as pain. The body really is responding to the coming storm. The old wrist really is an instrument, and a sensitive one, and it really does read the sky, hours before the sky shows its hand. The folk-meteorology of the body is not superstition at all. It is data, felt from the inside, by people who have learned to read it.

The knowledge you pay for

But here is the turn, the thing that took the whole matter out of the realm of huh, interesting and into something that genuinely moved me, and it is this: you cannot acquire this knowledge except by being hurt. The reason the young can’t feel the weather is not that their senses are duller. It is that they have not yet accumulated the injuries. The joint that predicts rain predicts it because it was broken once, because it is scarred, because it carries old damage that the pressure can press on. The instrument is made of injury. My grandmother’s wrist could read the weather because my grandmother’s wrist had been broken, badly, long ago, and had healed wrong, and every ache of its forecasting was also a small recital of that old break, the body remembering, in pain, the day it was damaged, every time the pressure fell.

So the accuracy is earned, and earned the hard way, and this is why it belongs to the old and not the young. To be able to feel the weather in your body is to have lived long enough, and been hurt enough times, to have a body full of old damage sensitive enough to read the air — which means that every one of those uncanny accurate forecasts is also a kind of accounting, a tally of a life’s injuries all quietly reporting in at once when the front comes through. The grandmother flexing her wrist on the clear morning is not performing a folk trick. She is reading a signal through an instrument that a lifetime of living assembled inside her, break by break, ache by ache, an archive of everything that ever hurt her, repurposed into a gift for knowing when to bring the washing in. The knowledge and the damage are the same thing. You get the wisdom by surviving the wounds.

Learning to trust the old instrument

There is something both melancholy and beautiful in that, and I have stopped being able to see it as only one or the other. Melancholy, because it means this particular knowing is inseparable from decline — that to feel the weather is to feel your own accumulated breakage, that the price of the forecast is a body that hurts, that the old people reading the sky from their joints are reading it through the damage of their years, and would trade the whole uncanny skill in a heartbeat for the painless ignorant bodies of the young who are smiling at them. Nobody asks to become a barometer. You become one by being worn down.

And beautiful, because it is a real knowledge, hard-won and true, that the world hands to people exactly as it takes other things away — a small compensation, a late-arriving competence, a way in which the aging body, for all it loses, gains one thing the young cannot have at any price: it can feel the storm coming. I think of my grandmother’s wrist often now, more than I would have guessed, especially on the clear bright mornings that I have finally lived long enough to distrust, when some faint new complaint in my own body — nothing dramatic yet, just a first small ache in a joint that used to be silent — makes me look up at a cloudless sky and think, without quite deciding to, it might come in by evening. And I am right, more often now than I used to be, and every time I am right it costs me a little, and I understand her at last: that she was not superstitious, she was instrumented, by a life of injuries, into a person who could read the weather from the inside — and that the smiling young, who feel nothing and know nothing and stay dry only by luck, will each in their turn be broken slowly into the same accuracy, and will look up at their own clear mornings one day, aching, and know.