Paper short abstract:

Spaces such as front and back gardens provide a way to understand people’s relationships to ordinary atmospheres. In this paper I draw on research with people and their yards in Minneapolis, to show how engagements with weather involve senses, labors, and affects in encountering others over time.

Paper long abstract:

Single family houses surrounded by front and back yards constitute some of the most ubiquitous and iconic residential landscapes across the United States. As people live with yards, often over decades, these spaces become enmeshed in everyday life. Yards also become one of the most ordinary - and arguably meaningful - places of encounter with changes in weather, season, and the lives of others. This paper draws on conceptualizations of atmospheric attunements, as well as geographies of temporality and rhythm, in order to examine everyday weather and seasons through yard engagements. Based on ethnographic research with residents and their yards in several neighborhoods in Minneapolis, MN, I present some of the diverse ways yards and the nonhuman lives within them register and signal changes in light, season, and lifetime. Yards are sites for a variety of cultivation practices - from maintenance of basic features, to the design and development of elaborate worlds comprised of human and nonhuman elements. I show how the emergent and rhythmic nature of these landscapes presents possibilities for how people live with their yards over time, in ways both predictable and surprising. Furthermore, the ways people cultivate and understand their surroundings tend to form through iteration, experimentation, and skillfulness - developed through engagements between people, plants, animals, and atmosphere. These relations and temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the biophysical and sociopolitical capacities of yard spaces. In the midst of concerns about changing climate and weather extremes, yard experiences may be understood as one key register in understanding weather encounters.