We empty out of our subways for a Red Sox game traipsing confidently through a downpour that will surely bring out the tarpaulin and send us home. Weather, weather, weather. Weather defined in all its multifariousness heightens our architecture. It shadows and sunlights and three-dimensionalizes the buildings and environs bequeathed by history. How much more so here, where the richness of the seasons heightens the polyglot Boston building stones and pocket gardens.
Weather defines our very culture.
Adams' text, assigned as regularly as The Rise Of Silas Lapham , described our character seasonally. His New England, defined and divided by its extremes of hot and cold, its licentious summer and Puritan winter, is surely the only autobiography so besotted by weather. Many of us are, in fact, weather wimps. My own family stands at the hub of this tribe of talkers. Weather watchers, weather reporters, weather communicators all, the family tradition was started by my grandfather some eighty year ago during his early days as one of New England's first traveling salesmen.