8.15.2013… no clouds, no wind, no rain

The sun rose at 6:25 this morning. It was only 50 degrees outside, even though yesterday afternoon hit 90. I choose to believe the weather is shifting to fall. We will be leaving Two Dot for Seattle in a few days and somehow it makes it a little easier if we are not leaving too much summer behind.

8.14.2013...

Finally, last night it was clear. We set up chairs in the yard before falling into bed at 10. Doubtfully we promised to get up in the middle of the night to see what was left of the meteor showers. Half a sleep at 2:30, I saw an amazing streak across the stretch of sky framed by our bathroom window. We both wrapped ourselves in blankets and perched in the yard. There wasn’t much to the meteor show, but the stars were spectacular. Sometimes the sky seems impossibly infinite to me, but last night it was an overturned bowl decorated at the bottom with millions of glittering dots that lessened at the edges. I completely understood the idea of a flat world with a dome overhead. Science is a wonderful art offering facts and explanations, but there is impossible poetry in the stories we make up. Cold and sleepy, we finally left the star gazing and returned to the house stealing thin slices of chocolate cake washed down with milk before crawling back into bed.

8.9.2013… few clouds, no wind, low mist

A single cloud of ground mist crept into Two Dot. It must have started at the river, but at six this morning it lay across Guy Henley’s field, partially covering Weiss’s cabin, and completely enveloping Daloris Olson’s house. I wonder what went on inside that mist. What was Daloris dreaming? Or was she awake and afraid to come out of her house, not being able to see anything beyond her door? Just a little later, only a shadow of mist remained almost as if nothing had happened.

8.8.2013…

I laid near my father’s grave, or what passes for a grave, his bronze marker on the edge of the cliff where we launched his ashes seventeen years ago. If he resides any particular place, it is this. I laid my head on a fresh pillowslip. A cloud saturated with blue and gray and purple hovered overhead. I closed my eyes and there was thunder in the distance.  I kept my body flat, the length of me touching his earth. This is as close as I can be to the little girl curled in his lap, but those were not my thoughts on the mountain. In fact I wasn’t thinking at all, just letting the thunder roll and the clouds gather dark above me. When I rolled onto my side, facing his marker and the edge of the cliff, a wind picked up washing over my face and shoulder and hip. I wanted to stay, to let the storm flatten me to the ground, but Tania and John were collecting to go and I knew better. A quick kiss and I rolled to my knees, getting up like the 60-year-old woman that I am. Only then…trailing behind as we walked down the mountain did I talk with Dad. “I love you, I miss you, you are with my everyday.”

8.7.2013…

The marker of sixty years in this realm began at 3:30 today. It feels like a crossing, but I can’t really grasp what has been crossed. I now understand what my mother said to me with some dismay in her older years … “But I still feel eighteen inside.” As we slip into old age, are we brought back to the time of our crossing into adulthood? It certainly was a time of contemplation and bewilderment, as is this.

8.13.2013...

Storms have flirted with Two Dot for days… usually in the evening. Each day has broken with a clear sky and then begun to cloud over by afternoon. There had been some spits of rain, some distant thunder and enough wind to record, but tonight was different. Clouds got serious around six and by nine rain was pounding the roof. Wind roared through like the train that used to pass through Two Dot. And lightning repeatedly illuminated the entire sky. Flashes of light and then darkness… again and again and again. I counted the distance between lightning and thunder; some if it very close. We lay in bed and submitted to it until an impossibly long and detailed chorus of thunder ended it all. The wind stopped, the rain stopped, the lightning stopped and we fell asleep in the reverberating absence.

8.12.2013...

The weather has been volatile with rain and storms and only patches of clear sky. We’ve been cheated of the Perseids by cloud cover.