SubscribeSeptember 26th, 2011
just some observations on the first cold-wet of the year
It’s so cold today. The tomatoes will die unless brought inside. The rain will swamp their tender vines, snapping them at each small umbilicus. Already this morning I saw a green globe fallen on wet soil. It will rot and even those seeds, once released from broken flesh, will not grow. Not enough time hanging from the vine.
Caught unprepared, a mother of two wraps her babies in plastic. Travelling along the road in their double stroller, they are a crinkled balloon, one small brown foot sticking out. Mom’s dark hair is already twining, strands clumping as they become hirsute river beds. No umbrella is possible, both her hands are busy. But the rain coat?
In the coffee house we are all silent. Little pools of rain on the stone floor, trails of tiny drops from the tips of partially closed umbrellas. I wish the workers would switch off the sound track. It would be better to hear the mute rain and not just the loud cresting waves as cars run past the open door and through the little lakes growing at the curbs.
Through the glass: yellow bananas hanging from their hooks next door. The sight of my heel in its leather sandal leaving the coffee house door. On a dark day, bright white eyes of the cars blink; curling aspen leaves fall, brown on the black street. No umbrella. No rain coat. A wet red sweater and cold toes.
August 22nd, 2011
on August 22 it rained
I walked yesterday in the sun. Left home around 8AM and didn’t return until sometime after 3PM. My feet hurt; I was hot, sweaty, tired, red-faced. Happy though.
I crashed early, and slept well, and woke to deep rain.
Wahooooooooooooo! was my first feeling and discovered it was another one of those “special” days that just seems sacred in and of itself, and somehow holy in the relationship between my continued living and its continued doing.
Now I’m out at the coffee shop watching people wander in the cool wet with umbrellas and rain coats. There’s a deep sense of relief, I have to say. The plants are greening and perking in perceptible increments, as am I.
Won’t walk much today (feet still sore), but I will be out on the street watching it rain (Blaser and Delvaux on my mind. I wonder what will come of that conjunction?).
January 12th, 2010
Vancouver, rain and the balm of coastal living
Work hours have been long of late. I get to work in the dark and leave in the dark and even though the days are beginning to get – by minute degrees – longer, I have not been outside enough to see it.
But then I have my lunch break. So today I went out to drink my coffee and eat my banana and sat in the only dry area outside my building. And for the first time this year, I smelt the first rush of budding winter honeysuckle. The fact that the air smells of flowers in January was not what brought me to the coast, but it is certainly a large part of what keeps me here.
After work, it was dark and raining. Not terribly hard, but for long enough that the city was soaked and the roads had patches of standing puddle. I had come by car that day (long, boring story) and so had to drive home. Getting out of downtown after work is a bit of a tense dance but once out and moving in the traffic along the edges of the core, one can often go at least two blocks before getting stopped by another light. The final stretch home for me is a long road that runs between older homes set well back from the road and with gardens aggressively healthy. What struck me in those final slow but steady miles was the interplay between the water, the lights and the smells.
I drive with my window open in all weather bar outright hurricanes. Driving along the last straight toward home, the air warm enough to swirl the mix of cedar, winter bloom and the occasional wood fire from someone’s woodstove through my car, the lights from the streetlamps, the homes, the businesses, sparked along the thin sheer of standing water, and broke open in sprays of colour when car tires plundered the still of flat water. Driving was like moving along a gently undulating fold of black satin. It was impossible to discern the lane markings; driving was more a matter of trusting the tail lights of the person in front of you, which surprisingly, was comforting. By the time I got home it was if work had never been.