Monday, April 13, 2015

20150413.0654

Rain is falling on Sherwood Cottage, following a line of storms that pushed though at around four this morning. As they did, something happened that rarely does, something that can be guessed at from the fact that I can note the time: the storms woke me. Normally, the sound of rain acts to soothe me and ease my sleep, and the rumblings of thunder rarely register, but this morning acted differently. I do not know why. I do know that it put me a bit off of my normal schedule; I have taken to waking at half past five, and I am able to do so well most days, but this was not one of them.

We need the rain, of course. While the grass in the yard is green and was already in need of mowing--I was working all day yesterday, grading and writing the freelance piece I noted needing to do, as well as another such, but not tending to my other writings, sadly--the rivers are still down, far down, from where they ought to be. They have been down long enough that shrubbery and trees have begun to reclaim the bared beds, signaling the onset of a new normal that does not bode well for those who would live here or those who are obliged to live here. That much, then, is welcome.

I seem often anymore to comment on the weather; four of the ten entries in this webspace prior to this one open with or feature comments about the weather, and my written journal entries, few as they are, often discuss it in some detail. Yet I am no meteorologist. I am, as I have repeatedly noted, a literary scholar (although I probably do not do as much work in that area as I ought to do). If I am looking at the weather, should I not be searching for the symbolism in it rather than simply marking that the temperature is such and the precipitation is so? Should I not care for it more on the page than in the world around me? For I ought to bind my world between covers and put it on a shelf, where it can expect to collect dust for days and years to come. Or so such thinking goes, although I am not at all sure whence it comes.

Perhaps I simply grow older, though, and settled further into ways already well-trodden. Perhaps, growing older, I mimic what I have seen of the old before me, anticipating being one of them as my hair grays and I find myself less and less connected to the currents of mainstream popular culture. What I have seen from them is often attention to the heavens in the day, reflecting an old affinity to the work of the outdoors with which that weather interacts but which is less and less often the work I or any whom I know do--or even they do who still look at the sky from under it and speak to one another of the water falling therefrom.

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