Reports after the July storm referred to “localized” flooding around the city. (I’ve since identified which subway stations are most likely to flood when heavy rain is predicted, so that I can avoid them.) The city’s weather, and the specific alertness it requires, can vary greatly from one neighborhood, or even one block, to the next. “That’s the way it looks from here” is as applicable an adage to an urban location as it is to a rural one.

These days — actually all days, every day — I’m talking about the weather with the people in and around my apartment building. The lobby and the sidewalk are my urban docks. Local, “it happened to me” (or my neighbor or my friend or my friend’s neighbor’s friend) stories transmit not just specific conditions and their outcomes; through them I can learn to make better future decisions based on other people’s less fortunate ones.

Leave the basement, the train, the station. Take the plants off the fire escape. Stay clear of construction sites and big trees.

And while weather talk is sometimes derided as small talk, deployed to ward off more personal interactions, it’s also how to know an individual intimately. The sole experience I might share, in any given moment, with any given person in my immediate vicinity, is the weather around us. Even so, a person’s body is the ultimate microclimate, as local as local gets. The same weather impacts each of us differently, given how old we are, how many scars we have, how many air-conditioners we have in our windows, if we have a house at all. Telling others about our local conditions — and expanding what counts as weather literacy, as our local new normals tilt ever more extreme — that’s part of talking about the weather, too. When the wind reaches 35 m.p.h., it’s difficult to hear what people are saying. During the first five months of 2026, the wind gusts in New York City registered between 35 and 70 m.p.h. on 26 percent of the days.

But other connections — equally vital survival skills — might be blunted, as well, if the weather remains inscrutable and unknowable, and understood, or misunderstood, as a whimsically destructive force that no one can predict. What we risk missing is an opportunity for collective curiosity about, and appreciation of, our shared conditions. On Aug. 27, after Ahlfeld texted about the storm clouds, she wrote: “Sun and rain have me looking for rainbows 🌈. Nothing yet.” And then: “Rainbow! To the east.” I walked outside and faced east. The setting sun flared orange against the trees, as if to remind me that fall, my favorite Maine season, was on the way. A full rainbow arched above them, earth to sky to earth.

Heidi Julavits is a writer who grew up in Portland, Maine. Her most recent book is “Directions to Myself.”