And Then The Clouds Came

Every evening the clouds gather. I read in the newspaper today the question on people’s minds is, Is this the monsoons? No, the meterologists say, the monsoons don’t come until July. The weather is cooler, cooler than average. This is the fourth wettest May in Albuquerque since 1913, I read yesterday.

I’m living in the new house. It was such a drawn out move. I had time to mourn our little house, then get tired of it, then finally almost hate the sight of it. Now I walk out on the patio and see the Sandias. Before I moved to this place I couldn’t see the mountains for the trees. It’s louder where I live now. I hear the city, the sirens that make all the dogs in the vicinity howl. The trucks that shift into low gear as they climb the hill. I wonder what this place was like before any big boulevards were even there. I wonder if the original family moved when civilization encroached.

I should put links in this piece, but I know I won’t. What to link? I’m writing it almost like a practice anyway. I’m starved for writing. We don’t have internet connectivity yet at the new place, so I have to come to cafes to get connected. For the past four days, you can find me parked outside a cafe with my computer screen glowing pale green in my face. I must look ghoulish to anyone walking past the car. But most times I’ve wanted to connect, it’s been late. Bands playing in the cafes, lots of people. It’s quiet in my car, and besides, I’ll be back online Tuesday.

Right now the sky is pretty clear. I have a feeling it’s not going to rain tonight. I have a feeling the clouds won’t even gather as much as they have been. Maybe they’ve been called to a convention in Amarillo. Who knows. What do clouds do when they’re not hanging out around here?

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PRACTICE: Memorial Day – 10min

I am sitting on a burgundy leather couch in the Satellite coffee shop. I used to come here and write with a small group of people, we did Bones-style writing, and I remember how much the music bothered me. Today, now, it’s a bluesy piece with an organ played low and a woman’s smoky voice. Lounge music. It all sounds the same to me. I wish they’d turn the volume down just a hair or two.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day observed. I think Wednesday might be the real Memorial Day. Is it May 30? I go tomorrow with Dad to Costilla, to the graveyard where his mom and dad are buried. It’s our tradition for this day. I told someone about this and she said, Isn’t Memorial Day for soldiers who’ve died? I don’t know, I told her. All I know is this is what we do, me and Dad. Not always, but for the past several years. Maybe seven or eight, I don’t know. Dad has done it for a long time. I joined him back when I realized it was a time to get to know Dad better. To get to know where he came from. I spent so much time knowing Mom and her parents. Dad’s were dead by the time any of us came around.

And now that musician with the head of curls, the one that Julia Roberts married for a while. What’s his name? That’s who’s playing over the speaker now, and I’m trying to think what I might have to say about Memorial Day that this song is preventing me from getting to. Nothing, perhaps. Nothing except Memorial Day seems to have become a holiday for grilling steaks or hamburgers, drinking beer. Opening up the pool. That’s fine. It’s good to have a day off, and for most people, when they have a chance to finally sit back and not think of much of anything, they think about their grandparents or parents or uncles or whoever it is that’s passed on and out of their lives.

Dad will meet me at my house at 7 in the morning. The girls went home tonight with Mom. This is about the first chance I’ve had to just sit down and write. To check on the blog. To do much of anything besides unpacking and organizing and staining those cabinet doors I took off the cupboard below the bathroom sink over a month ago. And now we’re living in the new house, things are all over the floor, paintings and photos. We have so much stuff. I thought we were getting rid of things along the way but somehow we didn’t lose enough.

And now an upbeat song by one of those young female vocalists like Avril Lagrine, or whatever her name is. I keep thinking my alarm has gone off, there’s so much noise in here now. Someone ordered an icy drink, the blender is blending, and the guitar accompanying the singer is going wild. I suddenly feel a sense of melancholy. Like maybe these trips I take for granted aren’t going to last forever. Dad is 83, and as I left him today after dropping off the girls I noticed the tremor in his hand was worse than ever. I love that man so much. Isn’t it just like life that you realize how much you love someone as the time they have left with you starts to get small, like a dot in the distance as you move away.

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Shadow Of A Dragonfly

–Shadows, May 26, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

She planted the deck flowers: tickseed, Meadow Cranesbill geraniums, Oranges and Lemons, red poppies, Fragoo Pink strawberries, and leaf lettuce in the garden. In between: cloudy gray rain, fall gusts, striated slats of sun, stunned clouds propelled by 25mph winds. It doesn’t feel like summer. Drove by the cemetery to see 100’s of flags in honor of Memorial Day. Thought of the uncle I lost in Vietnam. 

Listened to NPR, a show on Cody, Wyoming, about America and hunting and killing. The man being interviewed said if a person goes out to hunt only to pull the trigger, he’s not a hunter – he’s a killer.

I listened carefully and thought about the practice of hunting: waiting in the fog and misty rain, stalking the herd, firing the rifle, skinning and quartering the elk, packing the meat out of wilderness in three, 11-mile hikes, then on to the table for food.

Ancient ritual. Shared generation to generation.

I visited with a friend. I watched a movie with Liz on the couch. The hours fly by. Everything is green. We looked at Liz’s aerial photos from her trip to Cody last weekend. Around the Snake and Cheyenne, lime patches twist and turn next to the furrowed Big Horn Basin. The prairie in the distance is a rusty chocolate mixture of dry glacial ruts against puffy blue skies.

The view over Minnesota – bedazzling emerald streaks and anthropomorphic sky puddles amount to corn and cattails and soybeans and thousands of widemouthed lakes.

Dragonfly landed on the porch next to the screen door. “Grab your camera,” Liz said. Snap, snap, snap. Dragonflies were flying when dinosaurs roamed the earth – 300 million years of history, sitting on the doorstep.

–Aerial, May 26, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

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