Cora Fagan was not simply Piedmont’s oldest weather observer. She was Piedmont’s most creative weather observer. Folks said she could look at a cloud, tilt her head to the side like a confused blue jay, and predict the entire week with more confidence than the Birmingham meteorologists who had a Doppler radar the size of a barn.

Accuracy was another story.

But confidence? She had that in abundance.

Every March, she climbed the rickety ladder to her porch roof with a pair of binoculars, a mason jar of sweet tea, and a notebook titled Cora Fagan’s Almanac of Atmospheric Foolishness. Nobody knew why she climbed the roof to study the sky when her porch afforded the same view, but Cora insisted the extra elevation improved her vision by exactly four percent. Folks suspected it was closer to zero percent, but nobody wanted to question a woman who once chased a full-grown rooster down Ladiga Street with a wicker broom.

Now, Cora had seen some weather in her lifetime, but the tale she told about the March storm of ’83 remains one of the great works of Southern fiction, told with such earnestness that half the town still repeats it like gospel.

According to Cora, that storm arrived with a wind so fierce it peeled the paint clean off the Methodist steeple and left the whole church lookin’ like it was in the process of bein’ born again.

She swore the wind blew so hard it turned Old Man Bailey’s cow inside out for a full minute. She said the poor creature stood there lookin’ surprised at itself, then snapped right back like a britches pocket turned the wrong way in the wash. When folks laughed at that detail, she doubled down, claimin’ that the cow produced butter for three days afterward without anyone ever milking it.

Then came the part about the rain.

Cora insisted the rain fell sideways for so long that nobody could walk outside without bein’ slapped across the face by a sheet of water. She said it once rained so hard it bounced, and she had to close her windows because the raindrops were travelin’ upward like they had changed their minds and decided Heaven sounded nicer.

She described lightning that struck the ground so often it dug a ditch as clean as any county road crew would have, and thunder so strong it rattled her false teeth loose for a full hour.

Cora also reported that during that same storm, the wind hurled a wheelbarrow across her yard, carried it twenty feet in the air, and deposited it atop her pecan tree. She left it there for two years because it made a fine conversational piece and also because nobody, not even Cora herself, knew how to to about gettin’ it down.

Now, the truth is the March storm of ’83 was indeed memorable. A hard rain came down, the wind toppled two trash cans, and lightning hit a transformer out on Cherokee County Road 74. That is the entire factual account.

But you see, facts have never been Cora Fagan’s business.

Her business was story.
Her business was spectacle.
Her business was makin’ folks lean forward in their chairs, widen their eyes, and ask if she really meant what she said.

And Cora always said the same thing.

“Child, why would I lie about the weather. The weather lies plenty on its own.”

Folks figured she was right. Weather in Alabama in March can do anything. Even turn a cow inside out if you squint hard enough.

*****

New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.