Storming here, early this year. I'm hunkered down in the late afternoon dark while the house gets pummeled. I've left so many grapes on the vine, I'm afraid I'll lose them to this torrent. And the tomatoes, oh.
Oh.
There's talk of flooding in the news, and something in me wants to walk the banks of a spilling river, see its aggressive surge. I've said this for years, and every fall there is something more compelling in staying-in with popcorn and some strong black tea instead of trouncing out in hip-waders (which of course I don't have) to gamble on flimsy footing and muddy water-whorls.
We can have our illusions of safety, but as inhabitants of the organism we call earth, we're all teetering on the same edge.
When I was out running errands this afternoon, I couldn't quell a nagging heart-dropping sensation, and I finally remembered that today is my late husband's birthday. For the first few years after his passing, I sent his mother flowers on this day. And now she's gone, and so is his sister, and there are sharped-edged gaping holes in a part of me, somewhere that I can't identify exactly, perhaps in the solar plexus.
Everything surges forward, river or no river.
There should be a party tonight, and buttercream.
And small sips of Calvados to mark (to Mark!) yet another year.
Crank it up!
Stormy here too, but just lots of noise, light, and wet. Sometimes I think we have the same weather all over!
ReplyDeleteDear T - buttercream and rivers; each expresses your tugging sadness tonight. Interestingly, when I came to your blog this evening, I looked at your header photograph again before reading and instead of the dress on weathered wood I've seen here before, I saw a small continent with ragged coastlines and a distressed ocean. The word 'distressed' refers, of course, to the technique you use to stain the wood but reading on I see it's also a reference to the sensation you were carrying in your solar plexus when remembering Mark. Ouch. A friend who's just come through major heart surgery offered up the familiar image of life as a circle, only he added 'and that circle is a river'. He didn't mean that we swim around and around like fish in the same old fishpond but spoke instead of us getting to know the water in which we swim, its depth and temperature, the visibility dependent on the light or absence of light and the angle it bounces off or penetrates the surface. I like that. It's a little the same and a whole lot different. Love to you xoxo
ReplyDeleteA careful embrace from to you on the observance of this day, which so profoundly altered and affected your life and all the other lives surrounding the one you have lost.
ReplyDeleteLove, C.
"We can have our illusions of safety, but as inhabitants of the organism we call earth, we're all teetering on the same edge." Yes. Physical as well as emotional peril. As a river washes away our buildings, our known world, events and persons lost to us wash away our known world of order and balance and we are thrown (again) off kilter. I'm glad to remember Mark, though I knew but a little, and appreciate your writing about him.
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