Writing is like being able to put life into a snow globe. It takes the things that are too big and scary and reduces them into a form that I can put away when I want and look at from a distance. It also takes all that’s good in life and captures it into something I can take out when I want and look at close up and keep forever. It makes the bad things into something I can hold…and the good things into something I can hold onto. Both help so much that I need that little souvenir of life.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Rain, Rain Don’t Go Away. Again.

It’s raining right now. Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider that an earth-shattering enough statement to post on my blog, but at the moment it really is.

It rained only once in my area through June and July, but for some reason it skipped my yard. A few blocks away it poured for a short time, but all my house got was what felt like a little warm spittle. It was like the joke about having the storm cloud following over your head, but the opposite, when—irony of ironies—that storm cloud would make you so very happy.

The lawn hasn’t been mown all summer. My grass is as brown as an African savanna. When I just thought it was dormant, I was perfectly okay with that.  Now I think it's just truly dead.  More irony:  my grass may have gone to greener pastures. The lush plantain lilies, usually cool-elegant as a southern belle this time of year, have curled into fried pork rinds.

For a while I turned my blog blue. The color of Arctic ice. Of shadows on snow. Of cold, predawn light. Of the breeze I imagine runs a hand over lavender fields in Provence. But then it got even hotter and drier, and blue started to look hot again. It was the color of that ceaseless sky that sizzles clouds off like a blue flame. It’s the distant lightning, blue and electric and ominous, that tormented us all summer with distant growls and threatened to burn us all to cinder, but rolled on.

This free water that falls from the sky from shivery-silver clouds is now an exotic thing. Guess that’s one of the true gifts of aging. I've learned to take nothing for granted, ever.

Simplify, simplify…We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without. ~Henry David Thoreau

6 comments:

  1. If I were forced to bathe in it, the rain we received would have left me soaped up and unable to rinse. We received a spit too.
    I love your last line. This summer sure taught us a lesson.

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  2. I was driving home from school when the rain hit. We got just enough for the dust from my gravel road to stick to the water droplets on my black Tahoe.

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  3. HFFF--Now even your posts are poetic. Give us all a break, Tammy...Write something mediocre for a change.

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  4. We've had very little rain here either. Cooler weather (and hopefully autumn rains) will be welcome.

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  5. Fabulously descriptive, Tammy. I could feel the dry heat.
    K

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  6. I'm glad to know that you FINALLY got some refreshing rain!

    Kathy M.

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