. Spinning .

My sister calls, Want to cry? she asks.

Go ahead, I say, it won’t take much.

Looking through my mother’s handwritten favorite recipes, seeking lentil soup.  I found her recipe for crepes, she says, and on the top mom wrote ‘Susan likes.’

There are too few strange people in this world–though some would say that there are far too many.  But I think, not enough allowed to have their special loves and hates and who cares anyways?  Instead, a perfect group of equals speaking all the same.

A group of individuals.  The biggest oxymoron of them all.

I had that feeling again, of non-existence.  So I held my breath and watched  nothing moving.  Time truly standing still, no change.  One second exactly like the next and next and next. 

Such power in control.

End of May, end of time.  Deadline meeting with submissions, bills and rebates.  Stamp and seal and send away day with a little time to play around and make the last day of May today. 

Manipulating time.

The sun waits at the horizon, surprised by the rainwashed world so clean and bright like nothing I have seen since child eyes can imagine.  Smelling freshly laundered green leaves hanging out to dry on grey rope branches.  Photo Shop mist lingering on the lawns, reluctantly rising from its lush soft bed.  Cardinal chirping cuts with crystal clarity of sound, and not a breeze disturbs the drops left clinging to bouquets of lilacs.

Joy cannot be known as well except for pain.  Clean mornings cannot be loved without the having seen the dingey grey of stormy days.

I spent an hour watching a storm come in.  Drawn by lightning flashes in the distance to watch from the backyard.  Stormy clouds and underlying meaner ones sail by at different pacing, but the yellow sky behind the layers is what I’m looking for.  Moving up, taking only fifteen minutes to arrive, the tallest trees know first–I suppose because they are that tall and can see further than the rest and me.  They cannot speak, so violently shake their heads around, in circles almost; they are so very excited.

It’s overhead, the patch of yellow sky I stare at for a moment before it opens up in sheeting rain crisscrossed by lines of jagged light.  The customary drum roll is behind the graphic scene–I wonder why man chose instead to place it first? 

Loud, louder, loudest pounding drops of heaven’s sweat upon the roofs and walks and all that couldn’t hide.  The air lights up around me and the sudden fear makes me jump back inside, but I am smiling and I leave the door wide open.

How easy shed, some habits, while others weave their web of roots deep inside the mind.

I’ve not been writing–really writing for some days now. 

Focus and control, the power.  Sloth and doubt its adversaries.

One of my frame customers just walked in with a bag of Dahlia tubers for me.

A few years ago I had hundreds of Dahlias planted in my garden, as well as dozens of bouquets (honest!) in the house all summer into fall.  I lost interest when my friend, Andy, died; he was an avid gardener as well and the tubers were kept in burlap bags in his basement.  I just never had the heart to plant them that year, and by the next, of course, they had all shriveled and died.

Last year I didn’t plant anything either.  But this year the sadly neglected outdoors is urging me to come out and play in it.  Heal my soul and sense of life with the good earth. 

I’ve just gotten the kick I needed.  This Memorial Day weekend will return me to the tradition I let go of because in death, I couldn’t find the reason for the life.  Maybe it doesn’t really need to justify itself at all.

Cold wet wind.  The noisy gusts blowing space around. I want to curl back into the covers of my bed, of my life; then wake up to the sunshine on a better morninged day.