Fragments From Floyd

It rained and rained hard most of yesterday, and by the time I left Radford for home at 6:00, the winds were up and the wipers could barely defeat the swirling fat drops. Rain and wind: a bad combination for our two mile drive down a single-lane forested canyon road. At every dark bend, I expected a tree down across the road and was relieved to reach the low water bridges and find they weren't underwater.

It rained all night. Ann worried about the board across the creek washing away--again. We'd forgotten to pull it up, and she fretted about it much of the night while I anguished over the gutters that have filled with leaves and all night long overflowed loudly onto the metal porch roof. I never called the guy with the 30 foot extension ladder. A bad combination: a pounding rain, a sleepless night and anguishing over things that are mostly, as we say, water under the bridge. Usually, nocturnal angst is her specialty, and usually in one form or another, it's our grown kids' issues that keep her tossing and turning. Both have large life events looming, or are traveling, or need a hug, and she can't help with any of that in the wee hours far away. And the water in the stream only passes one way, I tell her. Let it go.

Segue: Well, I started the two paragraphs above yesterday morning, and I'm sure I was going somewhere with this but got majorly sidetracked with honey-dos. We removed screens and washed windows because it was a warm day; but warm days are when the wasps revive, and one of the nasty varmits nailed me while I was holding a 3 x 5 foot screen out the upstairs window. Later in the morning Ann called me to another window: nine turkeys were zigzagging their foraging dance in a pouring rain, down by the garden. I watched them through the binoculars for a while. When they got about as close as they were likely to get (but still out of range for the rifle with no sight) I took a shot through the open window. Eight flew across the creek into the pasture; one hopped the opposite direction up the road--I might have winged him, but we discovered no sign. The house smelled of gunpowder for the rest of the morning. Later, we walked the dog up the road in a hard rain; the roiling water was deep over both the low-water bridges, explaining why we'd seen no one on the road during the morning hours.

While working on the screens upstairs, we found one of several plastic bins of unsorted photographs, and before long, we were sitting on the carpet passing pictures of dogs and kittens we have known, the half dozen houses and neighborhoods we've lived in, and of course, the kids through the ages. I'll have to remember how good it is for us, and especially for da momma, to at least be able to see our children, hold their dogeared memories and gather in the years of our lives together. Next time she wakes me at 2 a.m. worrying about currents in other lives that we have no control over, events that are passing on their way to the ocean of Fate and Higher Purpose, I'll just send her upstairs to the archives. It will do her, and so will do me, a lot of good.