(no subject)
When I left work the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The rain of late spring, begrudgingly shedding fat, lumpy drops, falling haphazardly on its constituents. Yesterday we broke a dry spell of twenty-seven days, or twenty-eight. Our parched earth, accustomed to reliable and constant wetting, offered up its thanks. They manifest in this city as a smell of rot and dust. When one combines water, rot, and dust, one usually can make mud pies. Those on foot are grateful for the grace the city shows, merely hinting at these hidden traps, eager to be tracked all over the carpet. We receive only the reminder. But then, few of us seek out mud pies.
The people who know weather know about high and low pressure systems, and colliding pressure systems, and rain-shadows, or mountain-shadows, or what it is that makes east dry and west damp. I do not know weather, but I know topography, and can say that up the hill is higher than down the hill, so when I smell the brine of Puget Sound, it is more likely to be a low pressure system on the sound, supporting the salt-cracked breeze up a hill. Or perhaps the high pressure pushes down on the ocean, and given no safe haven, the particles of kelp and dead fish flee-out to the wild ocean, up the cement hill, even back into the sound to be reabsorbed and consumed by the zoo- and phyto- and the other planktons too. But being on the hill, I can’t speak much to the plankton. I can speak to a confusion of senses, when I smell saltwater and the field of vision turns blue and the air thickens.
There are memories we are born with, those that haunt our nightmares. Which, given the lack of real experience to bastardize, seem to grant them a shade more validity than whatever fondnesses we carry. The falling one, and the drowning one, these I know; I have faith there are others I haven’t remembered yet. Woe to those who die in a city! Nothing to be done, no good to come from that potential energy. A waste of space or a puff of pollution--and these appeal? If I die before I wake, I pray my lord my soul to take. And that’s it. Keep your laws off my body.
The people who know weather know about high and low pressure systems, and colliding pressure systems, and rain-shadows, or mountain-shadows, or what it is that makes east dry and west damp. I do not know weather, but I know topography, and can say that up the hill is higher than down the hill, so when I smell the brine of Puget Sound, it is more likely to be a low pressure system on the sound, supporting the salt-cracked breeze up a hill. Or perhaps the high pressure pushes down on the ocean, and given no safe haven, the particles of kelp and dead fish flee-out to the wild ocean, up the cement hill, even back into the sound to be reabsorbed and consumed by the zoo- and phyto- and the other planktons too. But being on the hill, I can’t speak much to the plankton. I can speak to a confusion of senses, when I smell saltwater and the field of vision turns blue and the air thickens.
There are memories we are born with, those that haunt our nightmares. Which, given the lack of real experience to bastardize, seem to grant them a shade more validity than whatever fondnesses we carry. The falling one, and the drowning one, these I know; I have faith there are others I haven’t remembered yet. Woe to those who die in a city! Nothing to be done, no good to come from that potential energy. A waste of space or a puff of pollution--and these appeal? If I die before I wake, I pray my lord my soul to take. And that’s it. Keep your laws off my body.