We had plenty of warning. We raced the black clouds home from town this afternoon, ate a quick lunch, and then spent an hour carrying my old corral rails into the garage to keep them dry; they represent a cord of juniper all on their own, once I take a saw to them.

Some sprinkles started up, and we ran down to the creek to fetch out the irrigation pump in case a little flood came down from the mountains. It's a heavy sucker, iron, and awkward, with a 10-foot length of PVC pipe out one end horizontally and three feet of iron pipe standing upright out the top. I unplugged the cord over in the pump house and then wound it up, tossed it onto BrotherB's shoulder, and the two of us lifted and carried the contraption into the garage. What with all the rails stacked this way and that, we were hard-pressed to find space to store it in. Then we gathered all the little bits of firewood we could find lying around outside--not much--to a dry place; I left outside perhaps a half-cord of too-large hunks remaining from last year that need only a chain saw to section them into usefulness.

I'd forgotten to haul trash to the dump when I went into Davis Creek for the mail this noon (it's Friday already?); it's a 20-mile round-trip, but the dump's only open on Fridays, and we just wouldn't make it one more week. So our last chore was to load five full garbage cans into the Aerostar and make a second run out. We never did get more than a whisper of moisture at our place, but ten miles up the road we hit a wall of wind and wet that pretty much kept going on up into Oregon, from what I could see.

Starting Saturday night and into the middle of next week the weather service is forecasting well-below-freezing temps for every night and on through midmorning. Good thing I didn't plant vegetables this year. It's been a very short season.

Golden Egg Update: I was paid late due to the Labor Day holiday. I fetched the money from the P.O. box today and drove straight to the bank, turned part of it into a cashier's check, and went to the realty office. Alas, the manager in charge of that storefront is out of town until next week, and no one else can help. So here we sit. But I did buy a gallon of paint for my shelves, although now that the garage is full of rails I have nowhere to paint them.... We'll be patient, we'll be patient.

In town I stopped at the little Radio Shack to buy printer ink, and while the clerk rang it up I watched hurricane coverage on the dozen shelf-model TVs (all tuned to FoxNews). Those few seconds constituted the first real visuals I had seen connected to this vast tragedy. Then a little while ago, on the advice of a friend, I was trying to locate a United Way agency (fat chance, it turns out). Their various Web sites displayed some very graphic, very disturbing photos. I almost can't stand to think of it, the suffering of those poor children. With all this coverage 24/7, it will be a miracle if most of us don't come away from this with the stress disorder that relates to guilt, after a close friend dies, or a comrade-in-arms, or a parent or sibling or child--the survivor syndrome. How can we find meaning in our lives after witnessing such calamity? After feeling so helpless?

We all must counsel each other, must gather with and embrace and appreciate as many others as we can, to keep each other sane, to keep each other going.

God bless.
11:04:40 PM    comment []  trackback []  

At suppertime I plugged The Ciderhouse Rules into the VCR to watch while I ate. I hadn't seen it in a few years. And when it was over I sobbed and sobbed for the absence of family and felt so sorry for myself I almost couldn't breathe. The grandchildren changing every minute without me, their faces losing their baby fat, growing older and harder, their voices I'll never hear. This always alarms Brother Brian, but I can't stop it so easily.

I needed to be transported, so to speak, so I walked outside to find that Drama was flirting with the bland blue skies--thunderheads approached from the west. A sharp breeze was kicking up through the dry grass. I lay down on the bridge in my pajamas and watched the minnows skirting the new continents of algae in the stilled water. The creek has become a diminishing series of clear pools trickling into one another almost imperceptibly. I rolled over and watched the sky. Apple sat near, from time to time catching my gaze, blinking her own red-rimmed eyes. I heard little mews--cats approaching the bridge from both ends and from several directions. When I stood to go back to the house I was startled to see Lorenzo and Fernando llamas standing up against the fence wire watching me--for once not because they were hungry but because they were curious. I laughed and practiced saying "I love you" to them. I didn't sing them a song this time. And then I grabbed up a cat, and then another, and held them close to me as we went up to the house.

The clouds were only picture shows and brought no rain, but their shapes and colors and the ragged little wind that tried to build ahead of them had deflated the pathos, even if they couldn't inflate my spirit, and that was enough this time.

I tried going to bed then but my body wasn't ready for it. I came down to the office where I found Greta curled in the warm lamplight on my desk and the displaced office frog condemned to hunker on the chilly windowsill. From time to time he hopped moistly about, clinging sometimes to the windowglass, which was too cold, and then he'd drop quickly off it. The feeble slaps of his tiny frog body against the unpainted wood roused Greta and she came alert, ears pricked, eyes sharp, half-standing, until she spotted the source of the faint noises--only a frog--and relaxed back into sleep. I'm glad cats have no taste for amphibians.

For a while I sat on the bottom step staring at the volumes on my "spiritual" bookshelf. I hoped one would leap off and fall open, revealing all. None did. I saw the One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, volumes one and two, the only things I ever stole from my mother. She'd received them by accident from some book club back around 1970. She hadn't sent them back because she liked the shade of blue on their dust jackets, how they looked on her bookshelf (perhaps this very one), perfectly matching a pattern on the sofa pillows. They gave me such pleasure to read back then, and she wouldn't let me have them, and so years later when there was a chance I simply took them. I still look through them now and then, hoping to rediscover what had so delighted me that I felt driven to matrikleptcy (I just made that word up), but I still haven't done so.
8:24:29 AM    comment []  trackback []