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Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

Today, commentator Lorraine Johnson-Coleman talks about one of the true joys of southern living.

Lorraine Johnson-Coleman

Lorraine: "I love living in the south and one of the cultural aspects about this part of the country that I most appreciate is the beauty of the southern expression. For those of us that live well below the Mason-Dixon line, talk is not a casual undertaking or an exercise in efficiency but rather it is sweet as molasses.

Like good country biscuits. Good talk down here doesn't just roll off the tongue. Instead it oozes off in a beautiful sing-songy rhythm that paints breathtakingly clear pictures in the process of the telling. Even when it comes to something as usually mundane as the weather we southerners take great pains to make it as vivid, humorous and lyrical as we can.

Rain doesn't just fall here no way. When we're talking about rain down home, it drips and drizzles like honey drops on morning made breads, and even during a storm, it rains and it hails, wet stuff coming down like the devil hisself was standing right above us pouring it on out from a bottomless pail.

I remember too that during a hurricane, one of my neighbors described the billowing winds as "a bip-bopping here and there tearing up God's good world without nary a care."

Like most folks, I listen to the weather report each and every day. My newscaster is a likeable enough Yankee and he is usually pretty good at predicting the whims of mother nature, but his clipped New England speech just doesn't have the stuff southern speech is made of. I can't help but be convinced that if he learned to tell it the way the down home folks do, the weather would be a mite more tolerable to hear about."

Lorraine Johnson-Coleman is an author and storyteller from Savannah, GA and you can purchase her books by visiting our website at weathernotebook.org. Funding for our show comes from Subaru and the National Science Foundation.

Just Plain Folks : Original Tales of Living, Loving, Longing and Learning