Words + Images

A rainy morning and so it has been the past few days. Luckily, at least where I am, it is a gentle rain. Steady. The plants on the porch are happy with the exception of the lemon verbena. With the rain has come a briskness. While I’ve since learned that swiss chard and sorrel are cold hardy even into the winter months, verbena needs the warmth and so soon I suspect I will strip the leaves and dry them for tea.

It is too wet to sit outside. There are pools of water in the chairs. I should have tilted them. So I sit at the threshhold looking out, protected. It is where Steve used to sit in his chair. Sometimes from this vantage he would play a recorder. When he played, especially if he was on the porch and not just at the threshhold, I warned him to be careful of the young children across the street. Surely he did not want to become the Pied Piper and attract a gaggle of little people who would come knocking at our door. Although, but of course, a Steve of a different age/time would have loved just that and would have had me feed them. Or, if I wasn’t home, he would have surely taught them how to raid the refrigerator, use a knife, slice potatoes and cheese, whatever … and then school them in how to sit and have a meal together.

I sit here with my coffee and it is the falling rain providing music in the background. Later I’ll find the classical music station. We live on a quiet street without much traffic which makes it a mecca for children on Halloween. I have candy but I don’t know yet if I have the energy to sit outside that evening and be genuinely present to handout sweets. Steve enjoyed the ritual and sat out there a few times these past years doling out candy and costume compliments.

I don’t know yet …

As people start to talk about holiday travel and such … well, I don’t know yet what I want to do and I think that’s okay. Let others plan as they must and should but for now I am comfortable just being.

This past weekend was an intensely people-filled two days almost literally from dawn to dusk. Not in any bad way just full. So I don’t mind, perhaps I even relish, the “quiet” of the rain and the pearl gray sky. A good day to write (and I’ve plenty to do for work), and to read (also for work but also pleasure). And after that I will focus on the other necessities. It is amazing the paperwork once someone passes, and the need to develop new methods of tracking things that need to get done, now with one brain instead of two.

And after all that, might I dare go for a walk in the rain as I used to do so many years ago? Originally by myself but sometimes I would invite/coerce Steve to go along, even in rain or snow. Well, if so, at the first unseen puddle that fills my shoes with water freezing my feet, I’m sure I’ll look upward, as I used to do with Steve, as he warmed my hands under his shirt to keep me from getting frostbite, I’m sure I’ll look up and mutter innocently, “Please tell me again. Who’s idea was this?”

Onward … 🙂