Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Dampened


My goodness, but it's raining; been raining for days. I thought the sky had forgotten how to do it.

We've soldiered on underneath one improbable sun after another, day after day, all through last winter and into the summer, unmoistened and edgy, wondering who'd put the order in for this unrelenting brightness. Recent immigrants, probably. Arid folk who can't even get into emotional gear unless they're pelted with photons, who require an unremitting stream of solar energy because they've never learned to put any energy by. They have failed to stock the root cellar of their souls.

I'd felt sorry for the sky. I myself experience an odd phenomenon wherein, from time to time, for no reason at all, I momentarily forget how to swallow. I'll be all ready with a nice package of excess saliva and I start to send it backwards and something locks up. My brain actually engages intellectually at this point: let's see. Is it tongue pressed up against the palate? And then something sort of relaxes at the back of the throat, and everything whooshes down? Or does the relaxation part happen first? Or am I supposed to push somewhere? Don't tell me, I've got this. I used to do it all the time. So far, it's always worked out after a few seconds.

Puddles in the 'hood
But that's how I imagine the sky. The Sky of 2015, the sky that forgot how to rain. The sun poked out in the middle of the winter for a week or so and far too many people started to admire it, and it said, well, shoot, yeah, I guess I can hang around for a while, since you're all being so nice, and that was that. OMG, the sky says on its facebook page, I can't believe I ate all that carbon! LOL! And the sky gets a zillion thumbs-up, and it likes a little affirmation as much as the next guy. And by summer, when the lakes shrink up and the big snowy mountain experiments with nudity, it's too late. The sky has lost the knack. I remember I'm supposed to pick up a bunch of water over here in the ocean and then wring most of it out over the Coast Range, and then throw the extra at the Willamette Valley, but right now I can't remember how I used to scoop it up.

But now it's raining like the clouds just fell down all at once. The
TV weathermen are standing in flooded streets with little meteorologist woodies. The roof sounds like the staging area for Santa's reindeer plus his backup team. The low spots in the garden are advertising for trout. The Coast Range is getting fifteen inches of water and it's going back to work on its abandoned Flattening Project. The valleys are exalted, and the mountains are laid low. Mud slips. Rocks loosen. Roots change their minds about things. Trees entertain existentialist thoughts. Everywhere you look, water is doing its damnedest to get to the center of the earth, thwarted only by topography. It is a beautiful display of water and gravity, of the way things should be.

"There's water in the basement," comes the text message from the new renters.

That's one way to thwart. Well, it's just a little joke rain plays on me because it knows I like rain. Ha ha! How do you like me now? Rain can be quite the scamp. I remember how to swallow and Dave goes for the ladder to check the gutters. But I'm calm. Everything is as it should be. We've still got water, and we've still got gravity. I don't want to float off into space. I certainly don't want to float off thirsty.

43 comments:

  1. Meteorological woody, indeed. Sounds like the weather is working itself to one big swing of too much of everything. Hope your boots aren't leaking.

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    1. Around here, a woody is when you wake up with your hair sticking out all over your head! (Stolen from Woody Woodpecker). You can imagine the raised eyebrows when someone overhears you comment, "I woke up with a giant woody today"!

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    2. No it is not. I don't care where you're from. If someone told you waking up with a woodie was all about Woody Woodpecker, you've been had. Someone is covering up! Don't be fooled! Don't tell people you've woken up with a giant woodie unless you actually have!

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  2. "The root cellar of their souls"! I love it! I'm going to have to steal... I mean, remember that one!

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    1. Does anyone have a root cellar anymore?

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    2. In my New Old House, I have a root cellar.

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    3. I have a friend with a root cellar. But she's in Vermont, go figure.

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    4. Your tenants probably thought they had a root cellar...

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    5. my high school friend lived in a 100+ year old house (3rd oldest of 14) - they had a root cellar - fully stocked! I was jealous until I remembered my Mom could hardly cook let alone do any kind of canning.

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  3. Don't forget your water wings, just in case. And don't start swallowing if you go under or you'll get a bad case of the bloat.

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    1. I watched a car go whipping away in the flood in the last picture (taken a few years ago). I will never drive into water. For once I've learned someone else's lesson.

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    2. Anyone can learn from their own mistakes; learning from the mistakes of others is true intelligence.

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    3. Any fool could have learned from what I saw. I never imagined a car could shoot away that fast.

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  4. The tongue goes to the palate first!!

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  5. The sun can be a relentless pushy tart. Rain? A rare visitor here. Too rare.

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    1. I prefer it the way it usually is (used to be?) here. I guess a lot of people would just as soon have sun every day but I'm not even close to being one of them.

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    2. I am absolutely thrilled by every drop of rain we are getting. It was so dry here that with all the rain we've had, our pasture normally would have a small pond in it with ducks and frogs... there is no standing water at all after all of this rain. I am a fifth generation Oregonian and love the rain....

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    3. Huh. I didn't know that. Where were you raised? (Not Baker City.)

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  6. Yeah, I knew I had lived too long in the PNW when I started getting antsy if the rains were late in coming. Kidding; I love your beautiful country.

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  7. oh oh...flooded basement in renters home. Not good! Start paddling Murr!

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  8. One year, perhaps '78? It rained every weekend, June to Sept. Clear Monday through Wednesday, clouding over Thursday, drizzle Friday, rain until Sunday evening.
    I was up at OSHU that year, remember the short tempers starting Thursday well.
    I had grown up alternating between Tillamok and Bend, so knew what moisture was, but fellows from Boston and Kansas were affected by it more.

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    1. I'm not sure about that one--but I do remember it raining every single day all summer the summer we planned our outdoor wedding in the middle of July. And it poured then too. Big rainstorm all morning and then it started to clear up at 2PM when we were going to have our vows--and cleared up into sunshine as soon as we did!

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  9. Mother Nature ... all fuzzy babies and gorgeous colours and fresh air and then BANG too much of this, too little of that, critters eating other critters raw, where's it all end? With a flooded basement, that's where. Or worse. Good luck with that!

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    1. Still holding steady here at about our 15th day of rain and I'm still happy. But I am at a high point.

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  10. Is the basement big enough to swim in? Call it an indoor pool (*~*)
    Weather here is completely crazy; in my city, Adelaide, we're in day four of a six day heatwave with one street surface melted in one of our suburbs, while across the country, Sydney had a tornado and raging hailstorm, the same day as our street melting episode.

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    1. How do you know it's day four of a six-day heat wave until you've had the other two? Gawd I'd hate to think these calamities have grown that predictable. But I suppose they have. My condolences. Incidentally, we had a tornado not too far from here last week. Which is ridiculous.

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    2. The weather people are predicting a much lower temperature for Sunday and Monday before we start climbing the mercury again.
      I hope they're right, I need a cooler day to bake this year's mince pies.

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    3. Four days in a row over 40C in December, breaks a South Australian record held since 1898. Yesterday was 42.9C That's about 109F

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    4. Thanks for the conversion. That is well beyond sucky. What's in your mince pies?

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    5. Homemade pastry and the best of the best fruit mince from a store-bought jar. Make the pies, brush with milk and sprinkle with caster sugar, then sprinkle again as soon as they come out of the oven. I make them tiny,about 1 1/2 inches across and 1 inch deep, with the pastry a bit on the thin side so the flavour of the fruit mince isn't overwhelmed. Some of the store bought ones out here are positively awful, all thick stodgy "pastry" and yucky filling. There should still be pictures on my blog from around November/December last year if you care to search the archives for a half hour or so.

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    6. Monday, December 22nd 2014, a post about the baking of...

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    7. Wow. See, Mom made mincemeat pie but I always thought there was actual meat in it. No? Never?

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    8. Mincemeat pies here are just called meat pies, they're mostly beef mince and I used to make those too, large ones for dinners and Saturday lunches. Because I never liked the bought ones, too much gravy and not enough meat to suit me.
      The small mince pies which are fruit mince, spicy and tangy, with sweet pastry, are a Christmas item, not available in stores all year round. I sometimes make them in July, just for the heck of it.

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  11. we still have green grass here in Boston and warm weather for the most part (wore a sweater to work Tuesday). I figure your rain will hit us around February and we'll do another epic snowfall for the month like we did last year.

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    1. At least we don't have to worry about our rain stacking up so high it doesn't disappear until July.

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  12. Hummm, something familiar about that car/flood.

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