05.25.17

I know it’s not true, but I often wonder if the Universe sometimes just wants to give us a good shake, a wake-up call, or a warning of some sort.  A high wind, lasting 24 hours, had been predicted.  It was unusually strong and came out of due west, which is unusual here at the lake.  The Greeks called the west wind a “Zephyr Wind”, named after the god Zephuros, bringer of light.  Everybody in town was talking about the wind,  and when I got home to shoot this photo at water’s edge, it was downright terrifying to be standing beneath the towering Douglas Firs.  They bent over at an angle I couldn’t believe they could bounce back from and the roar of the waves felt like a freight train barreling down upon me.  From inside the house, I watched branches fall to the ground and pine cones scatter and bounce across the stone terrace.  I kept looking out on the porch to see if the robin’s nest had blown off, but it was still there, with the chicks (now four of them) huddled in safety.  Against the backdrop of ongoing news from Manchester, and the heart-wrenching photos and stories, it was an unnerving, unsettling day.

It’s calm at the lake this morning.  I wish I had nowhere to go today.  To recover.  In the middle of the night, we awakened to the sound of the sprinklers going.  It’s always like this in the spring, as Don tinkers with the timing system.  He got up and went outside, to the far west of the house, to turn the system off.  Lying in the darkened bedroom, I could see the light of his lantern passing by the windows.  I imagined what it must have been like, long before electricity, when lamplighters traveled through town and lit the kerosene torches, scattering safety across the walkways.  The stories that make me cry the most are the “lamplighters” in our dangerous times–the homeless man in Manchester who rescued victims and the subsequent GoFundMe site which has raised money for him to get a home.  The spontaneous singing of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by the crowd of mourners which had gathered together in Manchester.  The letter, left behind by our Montana deputy, who was shot and killed in the line of duty, in which he wrote to his wife, “Don’t let hate take over your life…enjoy life.”

On a blog I follow,  one of the readers wrote that her mother’s advice about living in difficult times, was that she must “brighten up your little corner of the world.”  To bring “one more star to life…”