The rural cohesive community is ruled by Nature's sense of time. There is a time to sow and a time to reap, and doing them at the right time is a matter of survival. Time is measured in seasons, in gestation periods and growing seasons, not in days and weeks. When cows need to be milked, they get milked, no matter when the preacher schedules the Board meeting. When the tide is running, or the fish are spawning, or the herd is calving, then is the time to act.
Weather is a primary determinant of life.
Bad weather is not just an inconvenience, an interrupter of social plans. Weather has the power to make or break persons and their social networks. The thing about Nature is that no one can control it. You take what it delivers, like it or not. There is a certain kind of fatalism or resignation that goes with rural life.