Ready for Wind and Weather
By Kathleen Holt
If I close my eyes, I can still hear my dad.
It was the 1950s, and every evening our family gathered around the dinner table. There were six of us—Mom and Dad, three girls, and one brother. We were not a quiet family. Suppertime was noisy, full of stories about school, chores, neighbors, and whatever had happened that day.
Two rooms away sat our black-and-white television. We rarely watched it during supper, but every evening it was tuned to the local news.
Then, right on schedule, the weather came on.
Without looking at a clock, my dad somehow knew. He would throw one hand into the air and announce, "Hutttttt!"
Instant silence.
Nobody argued. Nobody finished a sentence. We all listened while the meteorologist told us what tomorrow might bring.
I've smiled about that memory more than once while preparing for this season of the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. Our Fall 2026 theme is Wind & Weather, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized weather has always been one of the quiet characters in my own life.
If you grow up on the High Plains, weather isn't small talk.
It's whether wheat gets cut.
Whether cattle have water.
Whether the roads stay open.
Whether the ball game is canceled.
Whether Grandma makes it home before the blizzard.
Maybe that's why we still begin so many conversations with the weather. It isn't because we have nothing else to say. It's because weather has always shaped how we live.
Recently I came across an essay by writer Ella Frances Sanders. She suggests that somewhere along the way, many of us stopped living in such close relationship with weather.
We check an app instead of watching the sky. We glance at a forecast instead of reading the wind.
Yet, she writes, we still long to experience weather—to stand in the rain, walk into the wind, watch the snow fall—because it reminds us that we're alive.
I think she's onto something.
The books we've chosen this season each approach weather differently. One explores the mystery of wind itself. Another shows how climate becomes part of our emotional landscape. Two books consider tornadoes—one through imagination and one through devastating reality. And our final selection reminds us how quickly weather can change history.
Together they ask us to pay attention.
Not simply to forecasts.
But to the ways wind and weather shape memory... community... courage... and even the stories we tell ourselves.
Maybe that's what my father understood all those years ago when he called for silence at the dinner table. The weather deserved our attention.
This fall, perhaps these books will help us listen just as carefully.
I’m Kathleen Holt in Cimarron. You’ll find a full book list by clicking the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club under the Features Menu at www.hppr.org
