9.1.13 In The Neighborhoods, Summer Storms

What a cracking, thunderous, slamming, then torrential storm we all had in the midst of last night, fiddling around approaching for so many days, then finally BAM and it's arrived, that's for sure, waking up the neighborhood.

So many times our bones or our eyes or our devices tell us rain is coming, but it did seem to be an ambiguous presence that would hover for a few days, wind blowing it through to cascade down upon some other town some place further down the line. 

So I went ahead and watered the gardens round the apothecary; then too, the beckoning  herb gardens at home. Parched, the farmers fields were.  Here, the grandmother Aster warning me with their browned lower leaves. The Skullcap had been announcing its dry displeasure with its brown tipped leaves. 

In the shaded North garden, Wood Betony has been gently letting go their lucid purple blossoms as the summer careens into fall, nourishing its leaves that ease the stagnant headache and digestive related spinal pains.  As their small tender roots sat  waiting for a cool drink of something to ease their thirst. So much from such a small quiet someone. 

Heuchera standing by, effervescent in its pink with greens, blossoming time over, watching for hose or violet cloud,as the truth of it is,  either one would do.

In garden and home I have been turning some of the Gwen's Magic Oil into a wound oil for the coming year, so to its golden liquid I slowly add plants picked  from the gardens and lands about us;  the bright yellow and orange, antimicrobial  Calendula blossom, 

the soothing, mucilaginous Plantain, the St. Johnswort of antiviral and nerve pain calming  ways, the Comfrey that can cover and dominate the old herb garden at Hampshire College like an invading army, never ever to be vanquished -  but whose leaf and root knit up a wound, a bone, a sinew,  like grace on a go-to-meeting morning. The Echinacea that silences small microbes in their tracks, in your scrape, your gash, your inflamed mosquito bite. 

So these and a few more friends are slowly being added together to sit quietly, the Slippery Elm bark powder and the Rose Hips precluding unwanted growths and the blessing of longevity, as the oil slowly becomes infused with the separate gifts of each small plant. 

In the night we awoke to the final burst of the storm as it shook the windows of our small house, lighting up the fields, its thunderous booms and cracks resounding across the range.

 Crinkly eyed, the pup followed me about the house, stumbling sleepily, as I thunked windows down, unplugging computers, then  sat and watched, him up close against me, his big boy weight, as we perched on the hall stairs, peering out into the dark then light then dark of the wild ways storm. 

 I soothed him with the stories we tell young ones. Of storms in the summers, oh how clouds gather up moisture from ocean and mountain, how cold and hot encounter each other, how the thirsty lands do then receive the life giving floods of this clean rain. Of childhood imaginings,  of bowling pins in the Adirondacks,  of a cleansing wind sweeping through, washing  forest and field.  Leaving behind the staid damp lands we discover when we wake this  morning, slip on flip flops, and venture out to the satiated lands.

But still,  in the night, we sat together , as the old, deaf dog slept and sputtered -  as the cats perched on windowsills watching, I imagine, some nocturnal scurrying, with grand interest, and I held the  young furred one  and muttered reassuringly about  all about the way these storms come, and the way these storms then do go on their way

 




Reassured, he climbed back on the bed, but there was no sleep for some time, only sitting quietly now, light on, cats filling the room with their acquiescent presence, the pastels calling to me with their creamy vibrancy, the guitar snagging second place as a song began to scamper up into consciousness. Spread out, the black shining young one kept his head upon my foot, his back up against the reticent old dogs, and kept vigil, as he is wont to do, begin a Shepherd. Poor boy, up whenever we do not sleep.

And as I, 61 with children all grown, so no young two footeds climbing into my bed, or crying out, or waking and ready to roll, got to sit up, drawing languid things with crusty brightened pastel sticks covering my hands and eventually nightgown with their smooth polished powders, as torrential rains poured upon parched farmer's fields round our valley, rains that fell like buckets upon the land, through thirsty rooted trees, our vapid, lazy streams I knew now filled  and rushing as I sat and drew in the night, the storm come to change all that.

The felines repositioned themselves, silently and subtly, as they do, all about the room, taking up places on a journal here, a pillow there, my lap filled with a stretching white and pink creature whose blue eye and yellow eye opened and closed in luxury while I sketched and smoothed and curved colors,






 until finally sleep wandered back into the room, and, turning light off, everyone sighed with relief as I eased us back into darkness, as the rain pounded the roof rhythmically, as we all curled into each other once again. And here, outdoors, maybe at your home too, continued something wild and ageless and full of earth's grace.

This morning we slept in, even the tired watchful pup, as the soil drank what was given last night, as the spiders began the reweaving of their intricate miracle webs.

 As crickets peered out from beneath rock and leaf to continue on
with late summer feeding and growth, and the butterflies awaited the drying of wings, resting beneath broad branches, the sun something reticent and unapproachable in the late morning hours.

Til finally the air did warm, the wings dried, and outside they danced about with delight, the new smaller ones today,

feeding greedily upon fragrant Hyssop and rabid Phlox as Echinacea and BeeBalm finished up for the summer, the small Skullcap blossoms and deep blue Salvia and reaching squash with its moon like white blossoms a pleasant breakfast for all.

Then up the wetted drive we wandered, the old one and I, her magnificent delight in all after-storm smells, as she would stop stock still, head 

raised, nose catching all that I cannot, passing by like a neighborhood song, in the morning breeze.