Storms & Tempests

“It’s not a bad lesson to learn in the bleaker months: how you view a storm is a question of perspective; provided you find the right rock to watch it from, it could be the most incredible thing you’ll ever witness.”
                                                                   - Dan Stevens

“I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...”

                                                                  -  John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

I live in a place of fierce Autumn storms.  They are not frequent; my place is a place of fairly moderate weather most of the year. But when storms do happen they are usually of a most tempestuous and vehement sort.  The rain is of biblical proportions, the wind formidable. The wind seizes the crowns of trees and makes them arch and curve in obeisance – genuflection and curtsy.  Then tears their silly heads off and tosses them at their roots.

The rain, not the soft and dulcet succulent rain of summer, drives in pelleted force to the ground.  It forces the sapped soil to leap and scrabble  like a cat on glass. It wallops that soil until it relents and turns to quagmire – a bog of brown slurry bedecked with fallen leaves, twigs, and berries.

I have seen intrepid birds, too addle-brained or too late to take cover, tossed like a shuttlecock into and about the air. As I see them twirled and tumbled down the street, I fear for their little damp lives.

Our windows shudder and tremble; my bones fret and ache. I feel an intense need to check that our domestic creatures are inside and warm, that they are tucked and swaddled and safe. I worry about cold and wet birds; squirrels without tail enough to drape over their noses; moles with soggy parlours; and I even mourn the drenched, sodden earthworms – drowned and abandoned on the sidewalks as the storm tromps off.

Storms are repentant, though. They do try to atone. After haranguing us soundly, an Autumn storm always leaves a beautiful sky. An apology in pinks and yellows, and marshmellow clouds.

Drowned Leaves

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturned bucket from the sky dumping just on my head. I reach my hands up and out, as if that can stop my getting wetter, and open my mouth, trying to swallow the downpour, till it finally hits me how funny it is, my trying to stop the rain.

This is so funny to me, I laugh and laugh, as loud and free as I want. Instead of hurrying to higher ground, I jump lower, down off the curb, splashing through the puddles, playing and laughing all the way home . . .  It taught me to understand rain, not to dread it. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when I'd find myself without an umbrella. But my understanding would act as my all-purpose slicker and rubber boots. “

                                                   - Antwone Quenton Fisher, Finding Fish: A Memoir

“There is an eternal love between the water drop and the leaf. When you look at them, you can see that they both shine out of happiness.”

                                                  - Mehmet Murat ildan

My place is a place of rain. On the West Coast, where rain-heavy clouds lumber in off the ocean, where the tall flora fingers of thirsty trees pluck the candy-floss bits from the sky and adorn their heads with them, pulling the wet down to their roots – here, rain is perpetual.

Once the autumn rains begin, we forget the essence of the summer’s amber sol, the luminous transparency of parched air. Instead we remember a language of rain – drizzle, mist, shower, deluge, torrent, mist, fog, cloudburst, condensation; the fall, the pouring, the spate of rain.

The leaves dribble bubbles of moisture from their tips like they have chronic post-nasal drip. The soil squelches and the sidewalks are slick. The last of the summer flowers that were struggling to maintain a bloom-ful presence well into the Fall, now bow their damp-blackened heads and evolve into compost.

I am most intrigued by drowned leaves. Deep in ponds, pocked violently by raindrops hard and steady, leaves cluster at the bottom, preserving their colour and form for as long as they can. Drowned, they keep their leaf-ness, while their ill-starred kin, beaten out of existence by the rain on the sidewalk, become grey ghost-leaf shadows patterning the wet autumn cement. 

Ground Clouds

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."

                                                                                - Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.”

                                                           - Carl Sandburg, 1916 Chicago Poems, Fog

My place is a place of fog and mists. Now that the autumn season has begun, mornings often begin within the deadened, smothered silence of fog. Upon waking, I feel the strange hush – no train sounds, no birdsong, the muffled hiss of morning traffic. 

My world diminishes to what I can see within the bounded obscurity of the verges of the fog bank.  Within the fog, what are usually the normal scuttles and flutters of the beginning mornings become heart-skipping thumps and thuds. Horror movies and such use the instrument of fog to good advantage. Sound is blunted but underscored; innocent, ordinary forms loom out of the murk abruptly and unpredictably. A simple tree, ignored in the usual transparency of bright sunlight, appears portentous, impending, startling me as though it has not been in the same place each and every day.

Cold sweat and disquietude aside, I do love the fog. I love how the world becomes temporarily black and white, like an artsy Parisian photo – all lines and shadows and contours. I love how fog softens the world, taking the jangle of our lives and dissolving it. 

I used to tell my children that fog was a cloud that had fallen down. So, if that is true, then when walking through a fog, you may stumble upon angels.

Cobwebs and Gossamer

“Spiders evidently as surprised by the weather as the rest of us: their webs were still everywhere - little silken laundry lines with perfect snowflakes hung out in rows to dry.”

                                                                             - Leslie Land, The 3000-Mile Garden

“There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren't bothering anybody. If I were a fly, I'd have second thoughts, but I'm not, so I don't.”

                                                       - Richard Brautigan, The Tokyo-Montana Express

           

My place is a place of hundreds of spiders in the fall. The fall is mating season and, in an effort to expand their territory, webs and their resident spider inhabitants abound in spaces common and uncommon – trees, bushes, corners, walls, crannies, chinks, and crevasses. Their webs are organic feats of astonishment. It is a rare morning that I can move from the front door to the driveway without becoming draped in spider webs – the fibres sticky in my hair, my face enswathed in fine, tickling filaments. I stand in either reverence or consternation.

The spiders hang in pugilistic splendor in the middle of the webs, staring me down with a nervy confidence, sometimes running at me up a long line of silk like a dog at a stranger in the yard.  She exhibits a bantam fearlessness, a dauntless valor.

I never mean to harm them, though I am not above a bit of teasing. I will sometimes give the web a slight tab, sending the fractious arachnid off in an indignant stomp to the middle of the web, where it sits and glowers, its legs curled up under it.  It is not afraid of me. More offended and outraged.

My favourites are the cat-faced spiders.  Their bodies look like the faces of cats, complete with pointed ears, eyes, and whiskers. They are quite large, and totally harmless. Another is the Daddy-Long-Legs spider. I love how his bulbous body hangs from his legs like a hammock. His incongruous body is like the bizarreness of a tortoise – ludicrous but graceful, peculiar but poignant.

The spiders will not be in my place long – once the eggs are laid, they will die. Their webs will gather dust and debris over the course of the winter and, in the spring, the egg sacs will explode. Tiny, Lilliputian spiders will mob down the indestructible silk tracings created by their mothers and they will troop out to the garden to begin their own predator lives in their macro spider world.

But, for now, they are very much in my world and in my place.  We share a diffident respect.