In mid-March here in Minnesota we received an unexpected gift, a few days of temperatures in the 60’s and even as high as 70. One evening my partner and I even had dinner out on our deck beneath the bare limbs of the silver maple that gives shade throughout the summer!We knew the weather was an aberration. Of course. And as I write this in late March I am looking out at a lovely coat of snow, the kind that clings to every branch, every twig, and turns even this city landscape into a fairyland. The snow isn’t an aberration, though. It’s a common occurrence in March. In fact, we can easily have snow well into April.I’ve said it here before. I love weather, all kinds of weather. It was that love of weather that brought me to write Crinkle, Crackle, Crack … It’s Spring!, illustrated by John Shelley, a Holiday House picture book just out about the unlovely last days of winter that can burst so suddenly into spring. And another picture book soon to be published with Harcourt, Winter Dance, (illustrator yet to be brought on board) about winter’s early days.I have, in fact, been writing about weather for a long time. In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb, another picture book with Holiday House. And a series of early readers with Simon Spotlight, Wind, Rain, Snow and Clouds. (That series was first published in 2003, but I've just been asked to add two more, Sun and Rainbows.)I am Midwestern born and have lived various places in the Midwest for much of my life, so an appreciation of constantly changing weather lies deep in my bones, a ready topic for conversation as well as for my writing. (Once at an SCBWI conference in LA another Minnesotan came up to me and said, “What do they talk about here? The weather is always 75 degrees and sunny!” Later she returned with the answer. “They talk about traffic!”)A friend of mine, Barbara Esbensen—a poet, who published a number of remarkable books before her too-early death—once said to me, “I could write about snow forever.” At the time, however, she wasn’t writing. She had published a couple of books with a local press and then disappeared into motherhood and wifehood, keeping a house, making the meals. Most of us know the drill. In a phone call one hot summer day, she complained again that she wasn’t writing, and I said, “Barbara, write me a poem about snow.”And she did, a poem that turned into a book that restarted her career.All because she, like me, loved weather—a certain kind of weather, anyway—and used that love to generate words on the page.We humans are compelled to make meaning out of whatever is given to us: weather, waterfalls, the snap of an apple between the teeth … existence itself. And any kind of making meaning begins with paying attention, close attention. And with attention comes love.The storytelling instinct that presumably sets us apart from the rest of creation has nothing to work with except the substance of our days: a late-March snow, the glint of sun in a child’s hair, a sudden, inexplicable sadness.We are blessed with seeing, with hearing, with feeling, with struggling to understand. And living that blessing makes us creative artists … every one of us.As Rainer Marie Rilke said in his Letters to a Young Poet, “If your daily life seems of no account, don’t blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its treasures. For the creative artist there is no impoverishment and no worthless place.”