COMET!
The heat, cast-iron hot and immobile, breathless, dehydrated me; a mere pile of salt. For days I sat, hardly moving, unable to think of anything but my breath. It’s not supposed to be 97, 99, 100 degrees for so long in July. But I couldn’t get around it. I was forced into the moment. The heat, by herself, with no swimming pool, no air conditioning, no billow of air, allowed no escape.
We were all in it, sweating, breathing the same air as mummies; dusty, stale, ancient as the pyramids.
The lettuce wilted.
The crops failed.
The birds went into hiding.
Then the rain came.
Loud.
Pounding.
First the lightning came and then the thunder at a distance. Then a huge blast of wind pushed from the south, through the trees, rocking their trunks, upending nests. As fast as it hit us it passed and was gone. It tore open the pores of the Earth, the impenetrable crust, making her fertile again.
And the rain came.
I walked the forty acres when the storm had ceased. Large drops fell from the trees; the rain after the rain, the finale of the symphony. The needles on the branches were glossy, no longer dull. Red water puddled in the driveway; new bird baths. The sights and sounds of life after the rain refreshed me but it was the petrichor, the smell of the wet earth that really got me breathing again. Walking outside leaving deep footprints in the mud I was hit by the smell of the after-rain, the thick, wet, heavy green, perfume. EXACTLY what I smelled as a young girl in the mountains of Colorado, in Shawnee, at Stoneleigh.
EXACTLY.
Did I never notice it before, the sameness of that fragrance? Was that really the first time in my life that the rains of my childhood smelled like a storm as an adult?
In those summer mountains of Colorado we found a sanctuary. Away from the city, the asphalt and autos, we expanded. We were allowed to ride our bikes everywhere in town, walk to our friends’ houses, play at the park. We were limited only by dinner time, 6:00 (ALWAYS) and the streetlights coming on at dusk.
“Be home by dark.”
So it wasn’t as if we were suddenly free to be out from under our parents’ gaze. We mostly always were.
It was that we were free to be out in the wilderness, to be a part of the natural world rather than apart from it. Our five acre property with a huge hunting lodge and two guest cabins backed up to the National Forest and it became our playground. We hiked and fished and built forts. We cut firewood and hauled it down the mountain where it got split and carried into the house. We hauled rocks and planted trees. We sat under the trees and read books. We climbed those trees and road Radio flyer wagons, and “moon” wagons and homemade wagons down the steep driveway until they, or we fell apart. We skinned our knees and elbows. And zapped our tongues on electric fence. We played “Capture the Flag,” “Lemonade,” “Kick the Can,” and “Jailer.” We found buried treasure.
There are hundreds of stories to be told about Stoneleigh but I thought of it yesterday because of the rainstorms.
Stoneleigh is a three story lodge built in the late 1800’s in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. We called it our cabin but it’s really more than a cabin with it’s wooden floors and staircase and solid wood bannister that guides you to the second floor bedrooms. It has three fireplaces; a massive double fireplace built of stone that shares a chimney between the living room and the kitchen. The fireplace in the living room has a nook built in where four people can sit comfortably (if they aren’t siblings) and enjoy the radiant heat. There is a third, which we rarely used, in the dining room. The lodge has a pantry the size of most galley kitchens with beautiful glass front cupboards and natural lighting from the windows that look out onto a small patio. From that patio you enter, through dutch doors, a large eat-in kitchen. From the kitchen table one can look west towards the neighbor or north onto a large sunny balcony where Mom would sit in the afternoons and work on her tan. Arguably the most important feature of the lodge is it’s enclosed wrap-around porch. It is large enough to hold a porch swing and couches, a corner table with benches, chairs and all sorts of outdoor gear. But for viewing the approaching thunderstorm, the most important features when we lived there were the porch swing and the couch.
“Lightning,” Mom would call, often from the kitchen or the balcony, letting us know the show was getting ready to begin. That’s something our mother used to do consistently. I don’t know where she gained her appreciation of the outdoors, (her childhood home by a lake in Minnesota, probably) but I am certain I inherited that delight for celestial performances from her.
It only ever took one word, when we were young, to get us moving.
“Sunset!”
“Rainbow!”
“Eclipse!”
“Meteor!”
“UFO!”
“Clouds!”
As teenagers she had to yell a few times to get us moving and she wouldn’t quit until she had gotten at least a few of us, front and center, to watch the performance. In Denver we’d head to the second story picture window. In the mountains, at Stoneleigh, our front row seats were on the enclosed porch.
From there, when the rainstorms moved in, we had “the best seats in the house.” Lightning, five or six bolts at a time and thunder from the west, moved slowly over the mountains and into our little valley. We could sit safely (? maybe not as safely as I once thought) on the porch and watch the performance, the light show, the timpani drum rolls, the approach of the rain. And when it poured, rain water blew through the screen and underneath the doors soaking our shirts and chilling our skin. The thunder and rain roared so loudly we couldn’t hear ourselves scream.
And we did scream. Or, at least the “little kids” (of which I was one) screamed and jumped up and down and clapped our hands together, delighted. Sometimes, the hair on our arms stood up and the boys laughed when the hair on our heads did, too.
On occasion, lightning hit the chimney and took out the kitchen stove. You could hear the bolt charge down the metal stove pipe zzzzzzzzzztttttttttt and end at the stove C-R-R-R-A-C-C-K-K!
And Mom would say, “there goes the stove.”
Sometimes we’d lose all of the electricity in the house. You could feel it coming, our backs would stiffen and WHAM!
Out went the lights.
So we’d grab the oil lamps and candles and relight the house. What a performance! And we were a part of it.
After the rain subsided and the water came only from the roof and the trees (heavy enough that we were fooled sometimes that the rain hadn’t stopped,) we would run outside, screaming, giddy, and stomp in the puddles or in the ditch that Mom had dug along the driveway and smell the new Earth.
I am convinced that it isn’t the rainbow that promises renewal but that it is the petrichor which we breathe into our lungs, while we are staring at the rainbow, that revives us.
Last night I awoke with a start having fallen asleep on the couch with Po. It was just before 10:00 and something reminded me to look for the comet.
The word was on my lips before my eyes were even opened, “comet!”
It was the first night in several that the sky was almost clear and I could see the Milky Way. I ran outside to check for NEOWISE. It was supposed to be visible in the west, just beneath Ursa Major,...and there it was a long fuzzy tail, almost imperceptible, heading into a thin veil of clouds near the horizon. I ran back into the house (turns out running to see a comet is not necessary), grabbed my binoculars and headed back outside. Through the binoculars I saw wonderful detail of the comet and it’s tail. Back and forth I traded between bare eyes and binoculars to observe the phenomenon, comparing the views.
“Comet!”
NEOWISE is supposed to be visible until the 23rd of July but after that, not again for another 6900 years.
Standing beneath the indigo, star-speckled dome it was obvious why early peoples saw comets as an omen. My mouth agape, I stood, a privileged sentinel .
“COMET!” I texted my sister, Sandy, Hilda and Pat.
“Comet!”
For twenty more minutes I gazed at sky, at Venus and Jupiter, the Big Dipper and Leo; the billions of stars that make up the Milky Way. Then, taking a final look at NEOWISE, I thought of my mother.
Powerful memories written with heart and soul! Yes, yes!
ReplyDeleteThank you, VJ. Glad you enjoyed the post! I ❤️ Comets.
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