August 12, 2009, journal entry

August 12, 2009, five miles.

Luckily, I did not have to awaken at 3:30 in the morning to become beautifully rain-drenched as I now am.

I have just come inside at eight this evening, after feeling the thick stream-lets of rain pummel the ground and me in a magnificent late summer/precursor-to-fall warm storm that the farmgirl in me could smell was coming. My intimate friends and Goddesses know it is not uncommon for me to lie down in the green, green grass during a strong rain, no matter the time of day. There is just something about a summer rain that rustles the maple trees like cresting ocean waves, silences the summer insects that, in the morning, sound like the clicking spokes of a ten-speed bicycle, and quiets the birds’ song voices at the beginning of the storm though they quickly resume their hymn at its ending.

~

But the moths and the butterflies. I still wonder alongside my foxing copy of the children’s book, “Where Do the Butterflies Go when It Rains?” (May Garelick, 1961).

“As soon as the rain

stops raining so hard,

I’ll go quietly up to a tree.

And maybe I’ll find

a bird in that tree,

and I’ll see

what it does in the rain.

Maybe I’ll find

a butterfly, too.

Then I’ll know what IT does

when it rains.

But where can I look?

I’ve never seen a butterfly out in the rain.

Have you?”

~

Of course, my sons diligently ask me every time thunder burns and lightening blinds in the same way they remind me every morning to sunscreen my moth tattoo, “Mom, are ya gonna go out and lay in the rain again?”

~

I awoke early, my GrUBB (Grown Up BlackBerry) alarm chiming at five this morning. Time marches on, and the sun doesn’t peer over the horizon at this time like she did just a few weeks earlier, the days shortening, no longer long-limbed and stretching late into the evening. Coffee in hand, I debate an extra shirt for surely it must be cooler at this pre-autumn hour, its dark clouds threatening rain.

~

I don’t know how I will experience fall this year. Fall has been my favorite season thus far in Eastern Washington with her vibrant colors of gold, eggplant purple, deep forest green, crimson, chocolate brown, and burnt sienna, but this summer, I have experienced such a spectrum of emotions and meanings that I have attached to the varieties of lupine and lavender, ladybugs and ants, coyote and deer, sparrows and robins, beginnings and endings, gain and loss, that I am not sure how the transition of fall will feel.

~

But time steadily marches on. And although yesterday’s temperatures were in the 80’s and today’s in the 70’s, I didn’t feel the need to turn on the air conditioning in my rental car that needed the fresh air to rid its odor of a newly non-smoking motel room with cigarette smoke still trapped in its curtains.

~

The light also lays differently than it did just a week before, and I did notice acorns on the ground in New York City’s Central Park last week, acorns that to me are signs of good luck, plentiful enough to share with squirrels in their bounty. I expect in a few weeks, the rows of oak trees the boys and I counted earlier will begin to drop their acorns, the sounds of sizzling bacon surely awakening my stomach amid my right-brained half-marathon training. There will be so many from the 60-plus trees that I am sure that the squirrels won’t begrudge my collecting a few small bagfuls which I will place in clear-glass vases with pinecones and chestnuts, leaves and feathers, and put in my office as sculptures of found objects, which I do every year.

~

So, to prevail, I decide I MUST embrace the coming changing colors. Just as I experience the range of colorful emotions of the human condition, from happiness, joy, and laughter that well up like the bloom of insects in grasses upon each footstep, to their trusted and steady companions of sadness, grief, and sobs that burn hard from throat to chest.

And while I became drenched this evening, I thought how perfect it felt that at 5:30 this morning, when I went out on my right-brained run, after just 10 minutes, sure enough, I became drenched in a beautiful shower of streamlets. Just me and the raindrops.

(Although I am sure that the birds, butterflies, and moths were nearby, informing me that with this new season coming, I definitely will prevail.)

(LL, 8/12/2009. Prevail.)