My aunt phoned this morning to say she's OK and as miserable as can be.

They've had no power since Sunday night and the temperature there today is 100 degrees F.--no AC, no fans. The shingles all blew off the roof and the soaked ceilings are are starting to molder and stink in the heat. The cities and towns are immobilized with downed trees. Most of the telephone land lines are buried and functioning but cellphone towers are damaged or down and it could take as long as a month to get electricity back to a lot of places.

New Orleans, she says, was unbelievably hard-hit. The waters continue to rise there, and she says alligators are swimming in them. What with all the drowned livestock, she fears it won't be long until bloated carrion starts floating around. They must evacuate all the hospitals there. Gas is floating on the surface of the floodwaters, as well, and they've been spraying insecticide all day where she lives to keep down mosquitoes and the West Nile virus they fear will take off now. The generator in the Superdome provides minimal lighting there, she says, but no AC, and with temperatures around 100 now the stench in there is overwhelming, she's heard.

And three months of hurricane season still to go.

I told her I was just glad to know she was still in one piece, and that I had asked folks to send their prayers and good thoughts her way through the whole thing, and she started to cry.
11:31:39 AM    comment []  

Temps fell hard here last night. The first rays of sun struck the bridge at 7:45 this morning and it glittered white with frost. The llamas were nowhere to be seen. They've been sleeping flat-out in the pasture bottom all summer, but last night they climbed up among the dense junipers on the slope to sleep, and didn't poke their noses out until almost 9 a.m.

We slept deeply and long ourselves. I was slow to wake, felt I thrashed and machete'd my way past dense tangles of dream images to consciousness. Dreams with characters so numerous, plots and motivations so intricate I could find no waking language to translate them into. What I can articulate: An extended bit with soldiers and a rebel fleeing and hiding, finally captured on a moving troop train, and I think contemplating a leap from the fast-moving flatcar where he was held at gunpoint; another with a depressed mother who gave her precocious little boy to his ne'er-do-well father to raise, then became pregnant by him again, and when a daughter was born, gave the infant over as well. Office buildings, cityscapes, theaters. I went to at least two movies in the company of my friend, this sad mother, who was my across-the-street neighbor in some dream-Midwestern neighborhood.

Maybe the rebel story was from one of the movies. He was played by Alfred Molina (which I think is Spanish for Mills, isn't it?). But I could feel his sweat and grime on my skin, his bloody abrasions from running through underbrush on my arms and face, adrenaline pumping, and I tasted the dirt whenever he threw himself to the ground.

And there was another, where I watched figures in my little bank-book increase in 5- and 10-dollar increments, and then suddenly by $15,000--outrageous! Mysterious! Wonderful! And I determined to invest $10,000 of it immediately to secure our future.

These are less message-dreams lately than workings-out of maternal and menopausal issues, perhaps, and expressions of anxiety (the soldiers, the hiding). Although all through my adult life I have had these recurring themes of not being able to give birth, or of looking for a lost daughter, or losing her. I have interpreted these as blocked creative work, unfulfilled creative impulse. The dreams drive me toward some accomplishment, but I still haven't nailed it down. Things are especially urgent now, apparently, with the mother-daughter-pregnancy dream-theme night after night after night.

Today we drive out in search of a firewood vendor; we need two cords of dry juniper and a little pine to keep it going. I love it here, and plan for a good long winter, but I am putting some feelers out for a cheaper place to live. Probably nothing will come of that, again, but my monthly income dropped by more than half as of August, due to paycheck revisions and back-tax payments, and so making the rent here now becomes challenge absent some windfall or a reliable way to bump up revenues. I hope we can put the store together. And if we lived in town, fuel costs would fall from $50 a week to almost zero. We could walk to markets and banks and post office, and I wouldn't have to shell out for constant repairs to the aging vehicles.

So we'll see. Here would be good--great, even. Beautiful, amazing, but impractical. Just like everything else, I guess.
9:54:55 AM    comment []