Iowans are born with a weather gene

My Iowa-coded genetic material struck like a squall when I wrote a letter to faraway family members. Before you could say “Chinook wind,” I’d flooded the page with a lengthy recap of Iowa weather. Details about light and variable winds, precipitation and upper-air disturbances poured out while my conscious brain was stuck in a whiteout.

If you’re a native Iowan, something similar has probably happened to you. Your brain activity has been stormed more than once by the need to “talk weather.” I attribute it to being born with a weather gene.

I’m convinced that in the biological heredity of everyone hailing from the Hawkeye state, geneticists could identify at least one oversized, definitely mutant and outrageously dominant gene devoted entirely to preoccupation with weather.

We each must have a microscopic pair of chromosomes covered with genes resembling raindrops, snowflakes, funnel clouds and sleet pellets. Now sink your snow boots into this thought: The genetic particles that determine our individual framework are not contributed entirely by our mothers and fathers; some submicroscopic properties are graciously provided for every cell of our bodies by the Iowa office of the National Weather Service.

Have you noticed how frequently you find yourself in an “icebreaker” conversation — aka weather chatter? We easily can do a day without talking about such trivia as how many fat grams we had for breakfast, and maybe even last until noon without discussing sports. But try to go a day without a weather reference in our vocabulary and we’d find ourselves in a blizzard of faux pas before 10 a.m.

Our lips run out of control, uttering obvious statements about cloud cover, wind-chill factors and weak frontal systems; talk about extended forecasts rolls off our tongues without going through our brains. This stuff must be imprinted in every complex unit of protoplasm in our bodies to have so much control over what happens when we open our mouths.

In my family, my Monona-born and Iowa-raised mother cannot start a telephone conversation without giving the weather report from her location. Since she lives less than three miles away, I’m already aware of everything from her barometric pressure to what’s in her rain gauge.

My family copes with another rainy spring day by knowing it’s good for the corn. While neither my husband nor I ever lived on a farm, we’ll look at each other on a crisp, clear fall day and say in unison, “Good day to be harvesting.”  What do we know? It’s got to be the Iowa weather gene.

After my recent letter- and weather-writing experience, I looked at correspondence I’d written on my computer in early September to California friends. My first paragraph focused on a welcomed drop in humidity, my delight in finally turning off the air conditioning and opening up the house, and a notation about learning to live with parched brown grass by mid-summer.

It’s hard to believe that even when I wrote on the computer and had the option of deleting all the weather references before the letter is printed I don’t obliterate them from the page. The weather gene won’t let me.

When I call an out-of-town client or supplier, I’m compelled to secure or share a weather fact. If nothing “significant” is happening outside my window, I ask if the sun is shining there or how much snow they’re expecting to get. There’s no explainable reason I consciously need this information. It has to be my obsessive weather gene. I turn on television at 6 and 10 p.m. to hear three doses of weather in 30 minutes: 1) a preview of what I’ll hear later in the broadcast; 2) my weather fix; and 3) a wrap-up of current conditions.  Imagine takin in all that weather when I’m getting only 30-second sound-bites from newscasters about everything else that’s happening all over the globe. I can only assume that my genetic material requires me to know what kind of weather we and our friends in North Platte just endured but not the history behind the latest terrorist activity in another part of the world.

I’m amused that the weather gene is dominating generations of people in a state where you can experience the distinct characteristics of four seasons, sometimes all in a matter of days.

But I’ve started to wonder if the portion of my brain devoted to atmospheric data is taking over, destroying all other information stored in my head. Why else could I recall the chilling details of the April snowstorm of 1973, but not remember what I did yesterday?