Small Talk

Laura Dennis

It all started with a speech. Not a speech I heard at the time it was delivered, but rather one I read long after my grandmother died. In this speech, given at the Canisteo Rotary Club in the 1990s, my grandmother, then in her seventies, reflected on her career as a journalist. It is one thing to be a young adult and know your grandmother was a writer, to have received copies of her columns in fat envelopes and with birthday cards. It is another to be in your 40s and realize your grandmother was a writer. The thing you want to be. She wrote about everything from the changes in family farms and agriculture to more sensational events, such as a toddler lost in the woods or a headless body found in the hills of New York’s Southern Tier. Contrary to what you had always believed, she did not just write Sunday columns about aging and life in the country, although that, you now see, was extraordinary in its own right.

Conventional wisdom says not to write about our grandparents, that no one wants to hear “some sentimental shit about dear old grandparents,” to quote Bobbie Ann Mason’s professor in her memoir Clear Springs. Such advice reminds me of the way people dismiss conversations about the weather. Small talk, it is often called. Small as in insignificant, to be engaged in sparingly if at all. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you had best heed this advice.

Heed it I did for many years, even as something gnawed at me deep inside. The stories I most want to tell involve precisely those two things: my grandmother and the weather. This journey did not begin with a speech. It began well before that, with a storm named Agnes, Hurricane Agnes to be exact, which struck when I was learning to walk in a Maryland campground while my grandparents spent long hours on the road each day covering the storm.

Last week, it rained here in southeast Kentucky, enough that one morning, I struggled to find even an hour when the roads and skies would be clear enough for my customary long walks with my dog. I opened the weather app, which had once more taken over the number one spot in my Siri-recommended shortcuts, and scrolled through the hourly forecast. It showed a 2% chance of rain for the next 3 hours. I clicked over to the radar, where I saw not a single splotch of even the palest green.

When I put the phone down, however, I saw splotches spreading into concentric circles on the nearby pond. I went in the bedroom to grab my shoes all the same, but abandoned the effort when I heard gurgling in the downspouts.

In other words, it was another morning in Appalachia, where forecasts and weather apps only go so far. The models do not always account for the steep slope of hills, the streams rising ever higher, the convergence of low clouds and rising river fog forming a persistent mist.

There I go again, talking about the weather.

I have my reasons. Weather figures, for example, in the vast majority of daily updates my mother and I exchange. I think of Ada Limón’s poem “Relentless,” the way the speaker tries to joke with her mother about such ostensibly trite chatter:

          I say, Look, we’re talking about the weather,         
          And she says, You know, it does help you
          see the person you’re talking to. (The difference
          in a wind-blown winter’s walk in January cold
          and the loose steps of sun on far-off shoulders.)

Likewise, my own mother, more than 700 miles away and taking chemo for a recurring cancer, wants to see the person she is talking to. I want to see her too. I imagine one of us standing in the evening sun as tree frogs sing, the other hunkered down as gale-force winds rattle the window panes.

A practical reality also underlies our daily exchange of updates about the weather. I grew up on a farm and farming still represents a central aspect of my parents’ lives. Read any number of writers, including Bobbie Ann Mason, Arwen Donahue, and yes, Ruth Dennis. Each and every one will tell you that weather governs life on the farm. I remember watching the nightly forecasts, the rise and fall of the barometer, the color of the morning skies. In summertime, enough dry days in a row would find me perched on a tractor, driving methodically back and forth to rake the fragrant swaths of hay. A succession of rainy days, on the other hand, meant slogging through the barnyard muck toward drier ground so I could work my show cattle.

Let me state clearly that meteorologists can and sometimes do accurately predict the weather, despite what conspiracy theorists would have you believe. More often than not, they (the meteorologists, not the conspiracy theorists) have an idea whether it will rain or snow, even where a hurricane is likely to land; they just may not know how bad things will get. When Agnes rolled inland from the New Jersey shore, for example, no one knew rain would fall in some places for 50 hours.

What to do with this hydrologic output was another matter altogether. Structures built after devastating floods in 1935 succeeded in protecting some towns such as those where my grandparents mainly worked, Canisteo and Hornell. In contrast, Corning and Elmira, an hour’s drive to the east, did not have such flood mitigation systems, and so found themselves completely underwater. For those cities, relief of a sort came in the form of future flood prevention, with the construction of the Cowanesque, Tioga, and Hammond dams. Toward this end, the entire town of Nelson across the border in northern Pennsylvania, perhaps too damaged by Agnes to be salvageable, had to relocate to higher ground.

Although my grandparents’ farm suffered less damage than many others, my uncle tells of the crops lost that summer, that even two months on, you could not take equipment out into the hayfields without it sinking into the ground. He still lives on a piece of the original Dennis family land, has seen other disasters, including floods in 2021 and 2024 that both times all but destroyed the Jasper Central School. He once showed me a photograph taken by my grandfather, a farmer and photojournalist who worked alongside his wife. The image, which was picked up by the wire services, shows a handful of Holstein cattle up to their hips in surging water. In the foreground stands a man, clad in a raincoat with the hood pushed back, looking on. While we cannot see the man’s face, as his likeness has been captured from behind, the slump of his shoulders and the scene itself tell us all we need to know what he’s going through.

Tell me. Does this sound like small talk to you?

Of all the things in my grandmother’s speech—the headless body, the missing child, the national feature stories, her years as editor-in-chief of the Canisteo paper—it was Hurricane Agnes that stayed in my mind. Imagine realizing that those old people you went camping with or visited on Sundays actively covered one of the state’s, indeed the nation’s costliest natural disasters. I may have only been one when Agnes struck, and yet I cannot help but feel guilty, even foolish for not knowing what had to have been an important chapter in their story.

I sought to fill those gaps by consuming information on page and screen, believing that enough knowledge would enable me not only to understand, but also one day (re)tell their story. At first, however, it mostly filled me with the kind of facts that make one an awkward party guest. “Did you know that FEMA was created seven years after Agnes?” “Let me tell you about the engineers who died in Hornell when their helicopter hit a power line.” Not exactly sparkling conversation starters, and not as helpful as I had hoped when it came to re-creating my grandparents’ story. I read and re-read. I tried to find my way in through free writes. Nothing. I felt almost as stuck as those cattle (who, by the way, survived).

The obsession had in no way abated when I left for the Appalachian Writers ‘Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky on July 24, 2022, 50 years after my grandparents found themselves reporting from the front lines of Agnes. Although rain was in the forecast, I had no idea history was about to try repeating itself, albeit in a different form. Instead of a hurricane, we had “training echoes,” so named, according to NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, “because the line of storms looks like a line of railroad cars moving over the same area, one after another.” I have written elsewhere, as have others, about what the night of July 27^th into the 28^th was like. Here, I will say only that the first light of July 28^th revealed a place forever changed, just as Agnes changed the land where my father and I were raised, where much of my family continues to live to this day. Both times, we knew the rain was coming. Neither time could we have begun to guess the scale of what was to unfold.

My eldest daughter and her toddler son like to fall asleep to the sound of rain. When water dances on the roof and streams from the sky, she turns off the sleep app and my grandson drifts off like the baby he still mostly is.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, I lie awake. As time passes, I find I tremble less, but still, rest does not often come. Logic tells me the rain will do what it will do whether I am asleep or sitting up in bed, staring at the fairy lights on my curtain rod as I try to distract myself with music or a podcast. Logic, however, proves a poor remedy for my problem.

It has, I have learned, a name. According to an article in the online magazine Psychologs, “Ombrophobia, also known as pluviophobia, is an anxiety complaint characterized by an inordinate and illogical fear of rain.” “Anxiety?” That sounds right. Same with “complaint” and “fear.” But “inordinate?” “Illogical?” Have the people who wrote this ever seen an ankle-deep creek rise more than 30 feet in a matter of hours? Have they choked on the stench of the strange toxic mud that now fills their car? Have they lost homes, businesses, animals, friends and family? “People with ombrophobia,” the article later states, “may believe that rain can be dangerous in some way.” Listen, I want to tell the author, there is no “may” about it.

The Cleveland Clinic takes a more measured approach. “Ombrophobia,” their article states, “is an extreme fear of rain. The condition is a specific phobia (fear), which is a type of anxiety disorder. A person who is afraid of rain (an ombrophobe) may be afraid of major, destructive rain or just a light drizzle.” It goes on to explain that “An ombrophobe may understand that the fear of rain is not reasonable but may not be able to control it.” I can relate. I read on, whereupon I learn that ombrophobia may be caused by a specific traumatic event or by family history. Family history? I was only one when Agnes came. I had assumed it did not affect me. Now, however, I have to wonder. I consider my ongoing response to the flood in Hindman, which has often felt heavier than the loss of a material object, one I could afford to replace, even if the object in question—a vehicle—matters a lot in a culture and economy centered around cars. I have to ask: What if more than one flood explains my reaction to what happened in Hindman in 2022? My reaction to persistent rainfall is slowly but surely beginning to ease, but it’s not gone. Could this be a form of generational trauma?

The deeper I go, the less this feels small talk.

In the end, I have not found it all that helpful to pathologize my fear. The thing that frightens you will not forever debilitate you in the same way every single time. It is not all rain that alarms me, nor is it always the rain itself. It is the sound that bothers me most of all, the way it slams into the side of the house in the middle of the night, the rush of it in the metal downspouts as it spills into the yard. Besides, it is not as if it rains every night. By the fall of 2022, in fact, Kentucky had moved from flood to drought. All things considered, one could argue that I cope quite well.

One way I have learned to do that is to allow these two floods, half a century apart, to become a sort of catalyst, the source of irrevocable change. Although I suffered far less than most—a car is hardly a home or a life—I have seen first-hand what it means to be in the heart of a natural disaster. As I learn more about Agnes, I see my grandparents as fuller, more complete versions of themselves, as people who lived in a world that far exceeded our small family sphere. Where that knowledge ends, experience begins—the 2022 floods gave me a visceral understanding I had previously lacked. When I look at my grandfather’s photos and read my grandmother’s words, I find layers I could not see before, things that cannot be known through research but rather only through the body. My heart is broken and yet I feel emboldened to ask hard questions about how we live on this planet and with each other. I no longer focus as much on my individual fear as on the ways this has all come to mean much more.

I end on that soggy morning when no rain was forecast and yet down it came. I grumbled. I groaned. Then I got those shoes, zipped up my raincoat, pulled my hat brim low, and set out anyway. Despite our best efforts, we cannot always predict, much less control when the rain will come or where the water will go. Fear or no fear, rain or no rain, we have to work with our present reality and choose our next step based on that. My grandmother’s next step was to do more of what she did best, to keep writing and telling other people’s stories, which she did until the day she died. As I write, I imagine her dressed head to toe in rain gear, calling in her stories to the paper while the rain fell and rivers rose.

Call me crazy, but I do not see how that qualifies as small talk.

References

Aldinger, Carl. “How the 1972 flood transformed small towns.” 23 June 2022, WETM, https://www.mytwintiers.com/news-cat/local-news/how-the-1972-flood-transformed-small-towns/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.

Dennis, Ruth. “A Reporter Remembers.” Canisteo Rotary Club. 1994? Canisteo, New York.

Limón, Ada. “Relentless.” Bright Dead Things: Poems, Milkweed Editions, 2015, pp. 34-35.

NSSL (NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory). “Severe Weather 101: Flood Forecasting,” https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/forecasting/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.

“Ombrophobia (Fear of Rain).” Cleveland Clinic, 15 Mar. 2022, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22534-ombrophobia-fear-of-rain. Accessed 25 Feb. 2024.

 “What is Ombrophobia?” Psychologs: India’s First Mental Health Magazine, 23 Dec. 2023, https://www.psychologs.com/what-is-ombrophobia/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2024.