New friends can certainly disrupt a quiet, orderly life. Especially if the new friends are in different time zones, and if said friends are truly fun and amazing people. Staying up late and getting up at normal times will probably be the death of me eventually. But who cares? I can always sleep next year.
Rain
We’ve had three full days of rain in the last two weeks. Hour after hour of steady, cool rain. And this morning, driving through the cornfields, the corn looked drastically different than it did when I wrote last. Those sections of fields that had been twisted and brown are still twisted and brown. But those sections that had simply been pale green with streaks of yellow are now lush and green. The weather man calls this the million-dollar rain for all the money it’s saved farmers in my area.
Imagining what days of rain would feel like, I’d imagined green corn, green grass, new growth on trees, and an abundance of flowers all reaching upward to the newly non-hostile skies in a celebration of life. It was a nice dream. But the reality leaves a little bit to be desired in the Celebration of Life department…..
A mayfly is huddled on my porch screen in the strip of dryness where the overhang shelters it from the rain. Breezes ruffle it’s wings, and as they do, the mayfly shifts it’s position deeper into the sheltered area, entwines its legs more firmly in the screen, and settles it’s wings. You can almost feel it’s resignation as it puts up with discomforts it has probably never known in its short life.
Worms, floating out of their holes, make their way like lemmings into the road and wait there to spread their bloated bodies onto the passing tires of cars.
And the ground itself, unused to such bounty, refuses to absorb the moisture. Floods have killed people and destroyed houses, bridges, and roads only a few counties east of me.
My cat, unaccustomed to the sound of rain, paces and paces, waking me in the morning to complain of the rain, and gazing distrustfully at it through the day. Last night he refused to sleep on the bed, preferring to continue his vigil.
And me? Does the rain awaken in me a desire to go out and splash in puddles? No. It makes me want to curl up in the pool of light made by my little couch-side lamp and read, sip tea, and nap. (Especially and primarily nap, actually, with tea and a book simply there to set the mood.) But instead I force my brain to concentrate on the paper I’m writing, building it sentence by sentence and forcing my eyes back again from the mayfly, which has yet again settled itself and hunkered down, determined to outlast the rain.
Drought
Driving on long winding highways through cornfields (or fields of any type) is a relatively recent experience in my life. I’m not used to it at all, and it always makes any trip that I take seem like a journey, even if it’s only a 20 minute journey.
Sometimes as I set out through the fields I wonder what I’d be seeing if I were used to seeing these things. What would I notice about the health of the field, the type of crop, the irrigation decisions being made, and the types of pests and diseases that might become problems at different times in the season.
But this morning there was nothing subtle about the problems facing the fields that spaced themselves between me and my destination. Leaves blasted into deep oranges and bright yellows curled in on themselves, having spent their last hours writhing in agonies of thirst. Those fields whose farmers still pumped gallons and gallons of water onto their crops in desperate hope of a harvest, those fields maintained a predominance of green. But the green wasn’t that lush, deep, cool color that predicts bountiful harvests. It was the slightly manic green of a crop that’s really just in denial about it’s impending death.
I’ve never seen this side of a drought. I’m used to lawns shriveling to straw. But you never look at a shriveled lawn and wonder if that family is about to enter bankruptcy, or if the food you’ll be buying in another couple of months will be twice as expensive as it is now. (Speaking of lawns, I’ve never seen lawns gradually disintegrate into dirt quite like it has around here, either.)
Unfortunately, even though we just had about 24 hours of soft, gentle rain, I don’t think it was enough to change the life expectancy of this year’s crops.
The Benefits of Procrastination
At work, all those little “keeping up” tasks would stay un-kept-up, desks would remain cluttered, co-workers would stay ungreeted. At home, the carpets would remain unvacuumed, the shelves undusted, the kitchen untidied. Without procrastination, where would we be?
The Perils of an Imagination
Last night, when the heat finally subsided enough that I could contemplate moving at all, I went for a walk through the newly developed area of my town. The sun was setting, the temperature was perfect for walking, and it really good to be moving for the first time in a really long time. But then my imagination got the better of me.
In my mind’s eye, each house had it’s happy little family doing happy family things inside of it. This image was confirmed by the occasional family sitting on a porch or starting out on a walk together, by a young mother holding her baby on while sitting on the front stairs, two middle-aged women coming outdoors with glasses of red wine, and a couple of bonfire parties. Everyone had someone, and I was just walking past. Each house bent forward to whisper in my ear, “You’re alone, you’re alone, you’re alone.”
I tried to fight back. I reminded myself that this was probably the after-effects of having been uncharacteristically alone at work today (almost all of my co-workers were out of the office, leaving me to stare at my screen in solitude most of the day). I also “knew” that I was suffering from an allergic reaction that always messes with my mood like you wouldn’t believe. But this didn’t seem to help.
In desperation, I stepped my defenses up a notch. The best defense is a good offence, they say, so I actively imagined fighting families storming off to separate rooms in their big, beautiful houses, and I counted how many of the houses that mocked me were actually still vacant and waiting to be bought (quite a few, in this new development).
But in the end, the houses and their insidious whispers won out. An imagination is a terrible and powerful thing.