Languor, Love, Power, Beauty, Birth, Death. You Know- The Usual Stuff

Well, it's a new day and a glorious morning and the rain has come and gone and there is no wind and the power is back on, hopefully for awhile.

I was asleep by nine o'clock last night and I figured something out- I really don't need that bedside clock whose light shines all night, annoying the fuck out of me. I fell asleep in inky darkness and it was heaven.
I am going to put it away, that stupid clock. I spend half the night covering it up with a napkin because the light shines right in my face and you know what? I don't think humans are supposed to sleep with incandescent numbers changing two feet from their heads all night. I honestly do not.

Yesterday was the strangest day. Lily and I had The Languors. Our bodies weighed fifty million pounds and all we wanted to do was to lay down but Owen was half-crazed with the oddity of having both his mother and his Mer Mer and Gibson didn't really fuss so much with his new tooth as was simply wakeful.

This is a Bumbo seat. With Gibson in it. 

The wind blew and then our power went out and yet, the sun came out, and then Owen got into the hysterical phase of tiredness and decided that everything he did was extremely funny including walking around behind me with his grandfather's shorts on his head so that he looked like a olive-colored ghost with a round head that he kept bumping my butt with and he wanted to play cards which means he wants to smush them up and throw them around and he had grape juice with an umbrella in it and I was tempted to add just the tiniest bit of rum and he got in the chicken coop and couldn't get out and when they left he melted down. He sat in his car seat wailing and weeping that Bop and I needed to keep him and to stop and let him out! and poor Lily. She was going home to a house with no electricity and no husband because Jason had been called into work.

It turns out that the branch which fell in front of Lily's house did more damage to the electrical wiring system than Mr. Moon could take care of and so a company has to come in today (hopefully) and fix it before the city can turn their power back on.

Lord.

The paper is full of reports of flooding down near the coast and by the rivers. Houses which have never flooded in generations are flooded now and it's impossible to know what that's like. To have your house filled with water and all of your stuff, the stuff you love and the stuff you need, all of it, trashed and left molding and ruined.

But. Like I said, here in Lloyd it's a beautiful day and when the power came on, Mr. Moon turned my fans on for me and he set up the coffee before he went to work out at the gym and when I got up at six thirty, it was like waking up to a new world.

 My house. My beautiful house. With palms.

 A tree across the street, lit with morning sun.

More of that sun, flaming the Spanish moss.

 Some lingering Confederate jasmine.

The youngster chicks. Doesn't Curly Sue look like a seagull?

 My zinnias. I love them so much that it's ridiculous.

Some of my phlox, enjoying their morning sun.

And so it goes. The storm comes and it wreaks havoc on the innocent and the damned alike and leaves us all affected in some way, hopefully nothing we can't overcome, hopefully with some new wisdom or at least appreciation for the mundane, the simple incredible miracle of electricity and cold food and light to read by in the dark.

I would like to mention that Vergil's sister had her baby yesterday, a darling little girl, and she was able to have her home birth, up on the mountain where she herself was born. Jessie told me that when she and Vergil went to visit, the new mother asked them to sing the lullaby which she and Vergil wrote and they did, with family all around and every one cried and when Jessie told me the story, I cried too.

And of course, Nora Ephron died yesterday. I just listened to her newest book, read by her a few months ago. I Remember Nothing And Other Reflections. It was a funny book and filled with honesty about marriage and divorce and movie directing and writing and cooking and being a daughter and a mother and aging and losing friends and coming closer to the end than you could ever have imagined when you were young. Hard to believe she's dead, that vibrant woman who was on the tip-top curl of the wave of women who made new rules for themselves, discarding the old ones which had been laid upon us like iron yokes forever and ever until women like her rose up, declared those yokes not to belong to them, and then went on to change the world and still manage to raise the babies and make the pies and despair over their hair, their wrinkled necks.

Life is fucking short and maybe that's why I love my zinnias so much- their glory so radiant, all the more so because I know they come and then they go and I want to gather them all and love them with my eyes until they droop and fade. Each and every one.

Love...Ms. Moon