How's The Weather?

This weather is enough to drive you insane. A few days of sweet, dry, cool air and then it's back to mug and heat and you wake up and step out of the air conditioning and feel like you're walking through molasses, you check yourself for gills.

But that's why we have these trees, these ten thousand shades of green where we live. So who can complain? It's been a quiet, quiet hurricane season (thanks, El Nino!) although the past few mornings, when I've gotten up, the sky has had that look, the air has had that feeling of hurricane season. Of a storm hundreds of miles off, but THERE, somewhere, waiting and driving us crazy trying to figure out where it is going, who is going to receive the torment of its winds and rains. I even dreamed last night there was a storm and in one scene of the dream, I was on a street corner and the wind and water came up so high that I thought to myself, "Well, this is it then. Death."
But I didn't die. And there are no storms lurking in the Gulf as far as I know. It is the Pacific's turn to receive that terrible storms this year and it was a tsunami I dreamed of, I think, my dream informed by the news, by the knowledge that somewhere else on the planet, others have the dread and terror of weather unleashed, too powerful to do anything but flee, but pray, but watch with anxious eyes. We may consider ourselves living in a modern world but believe me- there are still plenty of things that can knock us back to clinging to life white-knuckled, trembling and fearful.

I don't live where there are tsunamis and even with video to show me what they can do, I don't really know what seeing the water rise so fast you can't run from it is like. But I know the hurricanes and so I can imagine.

I've been thinking a lot about my words here. Because I have gotten to "know" some of the people who come here and read these words and because I read what they write, too, I realize that many of us have vast differences in beliefs and we live very different lives. And there is part of me that worries that what I write will offend someone whom I really do have a deep affection for. It is a mystery to me how we form these affections with people whom we may never meet, but whom we know in some deep way through their words, their stories, their pictures.
But you know what? If I start writing in such a way as not to offend, I won't be writing my own story. I won't be telling about this place I am with its hot, muggy heat in October, its wet air, its joy and anxiety (my joy and anxiety), its dreams (my dreams), its prejudices and its redemptions.

Look- my life is not all biscuits with honey, not all sweetness and light. Some days I am cast in the deepest despair and I need to write about that as well as I need to write about the days the light shines like gold spun so thin it can cover everything, everything, every thing.
And I have to write what I need to write. Some days I am just so grateful for it all that I need to write about that and some days I am so PISSED about something that I need to write about that. Gay rights, religion, hypocrisy, racial prejudice, sexual abuse, whatever.
And I have to write it the way it is in my mind. There are things I will not write about because they are the stories of others who might be hurt by what I write or whose privacy I might intrude on by what I write. I don't know exactly what my guidelines are for these things, but I have them internally and I go by them. I set myself inside these guidelines and I don't budge from them.

But if it's MY opinion and what I see from MY corner of the world, I will damn well write about it.

And that's all I have to say today. I do not feel heated up about much. I did watch Outrage the other night and I am fairly sure that our Governor, Charlie Crist, is going to hell on a boat made of hypocrisy and political ambition and whatever use and respect for him I may have had at one time is completely gone. But I don't feel the need to blast him. If he is, indeed, living such a huge lie it will come back to him. Besides, he has to live with himself, not me.

And I have so much to do today to get ready to go to Gatorbone. I'm behind already, having sat down to write this. I have fed my chickens and tonight the lady is coming to get Helen and Lucille and I feel better about her. She told me she'd spent sixty hours up with a calf who finally had to be put down and she said it made her so sick she'd had diarrhea. I don't think she's going to boil my roosters. I think she's going to set them down in the midst of lots and lots of nice plump hens to fuck. Really. I do.

And I have to get everything I need to get done in town before she comes out take my birds to paradise and I have to spend enough time with Owen that I don't go into complete shock being away from him for a few days. I have to make up three batches of angel biscuit dough. I have to go do data entry for Mr. Moon. I have to decide what to pack for Gator Bone and at this point, all I know I'm taking is an apron and I'm so damn crazy that packing for three days is the normal human's equivalent to packing for a round-the-world voyage.

And here are some pictures taken this morning.
The Confederate Rose still blooming, the lady spider still spinning, the porch still waiting for another cool evening and a frosty martini with Mr. Moon.




This is where I live. This is where I think about god and God and gardens and insanity and chickens and politics and culture and books and love and its joys and its pitfalls, its satisfactions and its difficulties and write about it all from my own perspective. Because it is the only perspective I have, although perspectives change, like the weather does.

Hearts can burst open with new love unimagined. New dreams can make you set different goals which change your life. You can hear something on NPR that makes you realize how small your world is, how big it could be. You can simply read something that makes you see a subject from a different angle- a book, a news article, a blog.

And this is my blog. Sometimes I write about the weather here, sometimes I write about the man at the dump who uses the word n****r unashamedly. Sometimes I write about how Christians try to save my soul. Sometimes I write about how chickens save my soul.
I doubt I'm changing any lives but my life is changing, as is every one's.

Let's not be afraid to write about the weather from our own front porches, our own back porches.
The weather is what it is. Different for you than for me.
Tell me about your weather.
I'll tell you about mine.

I can learn from you. The window to my life gets bigger and clearer. I can see your weather from here that way.

Can you see mine?