Unsettled Weather

A picture of summer ending -- white rosa rugosa become golden rose hips, the pink ones become orange hips and the red ones become bright red hips.  Nature makes a certain amount of sense.

However, nature has seemed out a whack this summer and autumn. My much loved habit of going to a quiet beach at about 8:00 in the morning and walking for a hour each day, sometimes with a pause for some Ti Chi Easy,  was very much interrupted. Each week seemed to have two or three days of gray, unwelcoming mornings. I actually didn't get much tan. And I didn't find the usual calm pleasure in my habit. Furthermore the horseshoe crabs which I love -- really it was just their molted shells which drifted up to the beach from early August through the month, were very few. Something had happened to those ancient crustaceans -- at least along this shore. That was sad.

The unsettled weather has continued into the fall. We had four or five truly beautiful Indian summer days last week. But for the past couple of day we've had fog,  gray skies, rain, and last night a serious wind storm that, the radio say, left several thousand Cape Codder without electricity. This morning I drove a short distance and saw two young trees down across the road. My elextricity was not affected and I slept through most of the storm -- actually because I had done some unusual self-medication. My boast of  "I never get those things that go around" has proved untrue with a Something -- not the Flu, not a Cold -- maybe we could all it the Creeping Crud as I might have in high school. Three friends I see often have been felled by it. I haven't exactly compared notes, but mainly it is a cough (I speak for myself only) -- a very bad, raspy, gasping, chest wrenching cough to free the  tonsils from feeling impacted with that "crud".

I fought back as valiantly as I (unacccustomed as I am) could with OTC decongestant, cough drops, various varieties of tea (I even pulled out some quite old slippery elm tea), and Tylenol PM which is my go-to sleep aid on the rare occasions when I think I need one. So I missed a lot of the storm and I have barely any voice.  But I did not wake up coughting during the night and have had only a couple of coughing spells today. 

This unusual turmoil in the ecology/atmosphere and in my own little body, seems to me a echo of the unprecedented turmoil in our political world. I feel something almost beyond despair at the actions of Trump and the apparently "head under the pillow" attitude of most of Congress, the uprising of hate groups and the home-grown craziness of men who create tragedy and terror with guns.  This is not a "something is rotten in Denmark" moment -- it's beyond anything Shakespeare with all his brilliance, could have conceived.  The world is not right. When one world "leader" becomes a taunting 8-year old callong another "rocket boy!" taunting him to use his nuclear capable rockets -- we are not merely on a dark heath or a storm at sea. I've temporarily lost my voice -- it is not a voice that carries far anyway -- is this the "whimper" that is all one can do?

Time to Return to Posting

Because the ingenuity of an artist and the magic of mirrors, here I am talking to a woman (who is painted on the mirror). I am standing to the side (you can see a corner of my purse on the right) and, also in the mirror is daughter Rachel taking this picture. Rachel wanted to go visit #1 son over Columbus holiday. All research told us the best say to go was to drive. Yes, we knew it was a long drive, 11 hours each way and we would have only one whole day and two evenings. It was worth it although we weren't entirely sure about that driving home. (More on that in little while.)  Monday was sunny and hot and humid in Washington (Joel lives in Arlington but it's a short distance. We spent Monday mostly in and out of museums --this photo was in the modern art one.  Happily they were air conditioned.  We saw art from the the 15th century to modern -- in some cases 'yesterday" because our first stop was in at a converted torpedo factory which now houses at least 50 artists' studio. We all loved the variety and creativity and commentary. In D.C. we went to the big museums and revisited favorites like El Greco, Hopper, Whistler -- you name it, they've got it!

We don't get to visit with Joel very often. Seeing him and his mostly minimailist apartment in a section with many modern apartment buildings, was a pleasure. He even took us to a New York style bagel place for breakfast, plus to a Uigher restaurant (very good and mostly different) and then a Pakistani restaurant the next night. 

It was a short, quick visit. The trip down was about an hour longer than it should have been due to a detour. And the drive home was an hour longer due to the worst rainy conditions I can remember ever spending 10 hours in -- on Rte. 95. We kept thinking the next state (8 in all) it would clear up but it didn't. Thank heavens Rachel had loaded her IPat with NPR programs and a nice piano piece to use when mediating  I had brought poetry books you Billy Colling and Mary Oliver and read them aloud.  The 18-wheelers were about 10 times the size of my little Honda Civic and threw up white-out conditions of water on our windshield. Rachel, calmly, heroically did al the driving. But I'm glad I was along at least for  little company and distraction.

I don't really go off-Cape that often so this was an adventure -- I'm sorry the weather was so awful. When we got to the Bourne bridge  which takes us from the mainland Massachusetts  and leads to Rte. 6 on Cape Cod with only 30 miles to Hyannis we saw the gray sky had a tinge of blue and the rain became a drizzle and then stopped as we got home.  Thus -- my autumn adventure and Rachel's heroic driving in conditions that can only be worse when the percipitation is snow.