Pouring rain this Tuesday morning. Lightning flashes. Thunder follows… it can never find us here. “You’re my witness, I’m your mutineer.”
Pines on the Priory’s skyline were like twiggy Rorschach tests, blotted against the somber grey sky, barely lighter than they are… if inkblots could sway. High winds, and high up, to make those giants dance. The grasses and Louisiana irises in the near-foreground of the patio, just 15 feet from where I sat in a bright pool of desk-lamplight, were drippingly still.
Instead of wind-tossed, like Dartmoor pony manes and tails, their movement seemed as slow as the drip-plunk of the rain, the broad leaves bending and bending until the weight of water curves the blade almost to the ground. Then all the drops slide off together and the blade unbends itself. In a summer storm, every leaf would snap back upright sharply, defiantly waiting another drop-barrage. But it’s fall, past the equinox. The irises straighten themselves creakily slowly, like old gardeners wearily straightening up from an hour on their knees.
When memory mixes up time
The weather on Tuesday mirrored my mood and heart, because that morning, my eyes — and hair — and pillow — were wet before I was even fully awake. My heart knew before my mind remembered: it was today, two years ago, I walked behind, “as they do in France, seventh class,” the rough wooden cart that served as Tim’s hearse. How grateful I am now for the blue chill and golden leaves of that day at White Eagle. If I had had to face the prospect of burying my darling through the misery of awful weather, I don’t think I could have borne it as I did.
I’d already immersed myself in the memory of Tim’s last days, and that day in Goldendale, while huddling under a quilt in a cabin at Fort Flagler, watching another storm blustering against windowpanes. Then, I wanted nothing but images: pictures of Tim and me in happier days. Today, I longed for sound.
As the kettle muttered to itself, I turned on my work laptop, reading a workmate’s first early morning post describing the fierce weather outside her home office. Unbidden, Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer” came to my mind’s ear. The rain slackened, so I could hear Tiomkin’s purring snore like the soft crackle of the fire in White Eagle’s lodge. Unlooked-for, I heard again the clear, gentle voice of S. reading Dick Allen’s poem “If You Get There Before I Do” during Tim’s funeral service.
The computer finally ceased clicking and whirring, likewise the kettle. The tea brewed, I read again Allen’s loving description of the refuge we all hope is waiting for us “when the long middle passage is done.”
I didn’t really need to: my heart remembered all I needed to know.