Falling from the Sky

High tide, storms and flooding in the night, and when I woke it was to lightning, wonderful thunder and hail so dramatic I lay on the sofa with my morning coffee and gave myself over to it. I now feel wonderfully post-operatic, in bright wet sunshine.

Of course I haven't done a lick of work.

I love that my little house is so sturdy in the face of all this drama. It endures without fuss, and when you think it started life as a hunting shack just flung up on pilings, it is nothing short of wonderful. There are houses that are tiresome hypochondriacs in comparison.

I have always thought that women have a relationship with where they live, Hestia, but maybe I have been ignorant about men. Nothing more fascinating and humbling than my own blind spots, I return to them like a dog to his sores.

Snow on Mount Tam

I am as thrilled as a child, although I can't see it for fog.

I went to the dump today, one of my favourite places, as good as American Soil or a lumber yard. I just love tossing it all out of the back of the truck to land with a crash - the microwave was particularly satisfying - and driving off light and purified while behind me that monster bulldozer looms through the Pit and bears it all away.... The farm animals add a surreal touch. Rich, rich, rich.

Now I can't install the new microwave because my saw makes the lights dim, and Stefan is editing. I have set it all up to do the minute he stops, but it is thwarting. I enjoy this sort of thing so much more when I have been working for a while and away from it, it mixes in with the sheer bliss of being busy with the work I love, to make me glad when I stop.

Off to Phoenix at 5am tomorrow, so I had better not be too ambitious tonight.

Skunk

I suspect a skunk has moved in under my office, where I sit at this computer. There is fresh earth down the bank at the side of the house, a skunky smell before dawn (when you consider my bedroom window is twenty feet out over the water!) and over the last few days Suscipe has been monitoring.

I Googled 'skunk nuisance' and had a rivetting early morning read including a hilarious string from a group of potters who collect road kill to make brushes. It seems I must seal the entrance while the skunk is out, and/or use an ultra-sound deterrent - a dog whistle?

I am a long way from Sussex.

Value

Value, values and valuing. This has been a minor preoccupation since I realised that I ascribe the whole value of any treasured possession to even the last dregs or rags of it. Hence my shock/horror/disbelief when someone with the opposite belief - that the thing depreciates over its lifetime - throws away my sacred relic.
Of course they are right. I had no idea I was so irrational.

Things I don't care for are tossed without a fare-thee-well.

What about people? Roger's death has triggered a see-sawing of emotions. I miss him even though the last few months were so difficult, I remind myself that I often marvelled at his pleasure in small things, the sun on his back, good coffee - when he was in such pain and so diminished. So I am consciously valuing small things too, as his memorial. Nothing is beneath my attention, since the valuing gives it value.