Marlene texted me Tuesday at 6:14 in the morning, which is when she texts me when something is wrong with the sky. The text said, “left knee. bad. southern hemisphere.” That was it. Three days later Cyclone Jacob came ashore in Western Australia as a Category 5 and the satellite footage looked exactly like what her knee had been doing all week.
I am not saying Marlene is a meteorologist. I am saying that the human body, when it has not been disrupted by seed oils and the blue light coming off a Ring doorbell, is a barometric instrument that has been refined over four hundred thousand years and is, by any honest accounting, more sensitive than a buoy.
Marlene has called every major pressure event since 2019. She called the derecho. She called the bomb cyclone the week of Garrett’s birthday. She called Hurricane Idalia from the parking lot of an Ingles in Weaverville, which her sister-in-law Pam can corroborate because Pam was the one carrying the rotisserie chicken. Pam works the front desk at a chiropractic office and is, for all functional purposes, a nurse.
The Facebook group I’m in — it’s called Knees Know: A Community for Embodied Forecasters — has been tracking this for almost two years now. We have a shared spreadsheet. There are 4,200 of us. We log knee pain, hip pain, the specific kind of headache that sits behind your right eye, and the dreams. Especially the dreams about water. Jenny in Tasmania had a dream Sunday night that her kitchen was a fish tank, and Jacob made landfall Friday. You tell me.
What the Bureau of Meteorology will tell you is that they had Jacob on the cone four days out, which, congratulations, so did Marlene’s left knee, and Marlene’s left knee did not require a satellite array or a $340 million budget line. Marlene’s left knee required ibuprofen, which she doesn’t take because ibuprofen is processed through the liver and her naturopath has been very clear about her liver.
I asked Marlene how she does it and she said it’s not a how, it’s a listening. She said most women stopped listening to their joints somewhere around the time they were handed a Diet Coke in middle school, and we have been paying for that quiet ever since. She also said the pineal gland is involved, but she wasn’t ready to go on the record about the pineal gland yet because her acupuncturist wants to publish first.
My own knees, for what it’s worth, were quiet this week, which Marlene says is because I’m still detoxing from the fluoride in our well water (which yes, I know, well water, but it’s coming up through the rock and the rock has been compromised). She says my reception will come back once I finish the magnesium protocol and stop wearing the rings I bought at Target. The rings are nickel-plated. They are interfering with my field.
Cleo asked me last night if Marlene was a witch, and I said no, sweetheart, Marlene is a woman who has not numbed herself, and that is what a witch used to be before the word got weaponized. Then I gave her a spoon of raw honey and put her to bed because the moon was waxing and she needed the grounding.
Cyclone Jacob is over land now and weakening, and Marlene’s knee, as of this morning, is at a four. She says by Monday she’ll be down to a two and we can finally go to the co-op together. I’ll drive. She’ll forecast. That’s just how it works at our latitude.