9.7 Faces Come Out of the Rain

The world wears a sad face. This is a hard season for me. I don’t even want to go outdoors. After days of incoherent weather forecasts I finally read in a newspaper story, a news brief which seeks, helpfully, to sum up what has been going on in the atmosphere – and what’s more important than the atmosphere? – and informs me that the remnants of Tropical Storm Story Lee, which soaked New Orleans, collided with a cold front along the East Coast giving us cool, dark, very wet days. I had foolishly wished for some rain over the weekend before we left for the Berkshires.
Be careful what you wish for.
In Berkshire County, the air was as humid as it had been all summer. Then it rained, really rained, way more than our so-called hurricane.
Back in Quincy Monday night, we opened all the windows and put on the fans and it was still stuffy in the house. Some time in the middle if the night the chill rains found us – somebody pressed the button for the cosmic cold service – whoosh poured in the chill, dank air of some other season, not late summer, not mellow September, the room temperature dropped twenty degrees in wind chill and I got out of bed to close the window.
O where has my late summer serenity gone?
I don’t even want to leave the house to look at the back garden. That’s saying something – something I don’t want to hear. This is not stay indoors time of year. I will find my sweaters. I will find an old hat (I left my good one somewhere) with a brim to keep off the rain, dig out an even older raincoat, and remember that this is the right time and even the right conditions to do the ambitious transplanting, moving some of the groundcovers around for stimulation and esthetic effect, re-arranging the furniture, so to speak.
Ah, I will get back on the job of seasonal beautification.
I will package my sadness in a trekker’s knapsack and get my hands dirty and my feet wet. I will stretch and strain. It will be good for me.
I will peek over my shoulder from time to time, glancing left and right, and look for subtle arrows of the sun.