Nature-in-the-City(1999)
May 27 The sun came up this morning very boldly, and I heard the song Morning has Broken in my head as it did. No breeze all morning, just a stillness that made me want to hold to silence. So I did. I didn't speak to anyone all day. I saw a film by myself later this afternoon, literally all by myself (no one else was in the whole theater but me). I like movie theaters on bright sunny days, when everyone else is outside and I'm alone inside. The theater feels like a secret place, then, and what I watch on the screen feels like a dream. Then, after the movie, I walked down Broadway and saw couples holding hands and sometimes kissing as they leaned up against telephone poles in the still-sunny early evening. The sun rises, the sun sets…but it also lingers. It lingers longer and longer, these days. Then by the time I got home tonight it was semi-dark, and a great breeze had started up, wildly rustling the leaves on all the trees, just as the wild breeze did in a scene from the movie I had watched (Lovers of the Arctic Circle). Then the clouds moved in. Later, around 10 p.m., they vanished—as if they had never been in the sky at all. The full moon's light was so bright that I could see the outline of the faraway mountains. It's a sad but romantic night tonight. The moon knows that the clouds are somewhere near, just waiting to move in again. I can smell a hint of a storm nearby. But still the warmth lingers. It makes me remember things, and that makes me want to write.
June 2 I was downtown when the sun broke through the clouds, as if it was parting them with its light. Such intense cloud-splitting! Then the sun stretched and stretched until it was shining through every window of every store that I went into. In the close distance, Puget Sound sparked like a crown. While the crows were just clowns, diving up and down in between the tall buildings, wildflyers more free than any of us will ever be.
June 22 (morning) il pleut dans la ville comme il pleut dans mon coeur
This newly-summer rain
June 22 (later) And then I was walking up the hill on Queen Anne to the café, passing rows of 1920s bungalows, the late-afternoon sun thickly hidden behind clouds, and pine trees in front yards making me forget I was in the city. It felt just like October…or should I say it smelled just like October—the way the scent of the woodsmoke mixed with the perfumes of rain and pines. Very much a Winter in June feeling today, and I loved it, because the weather was crying softly just as I was…though my tears, tangibly, were only the rain on my face.
June 23 This protective covering of gray clouds over the city, still, and the light rain that parachutes down to us.
June 25 (early morning) The weather. It's the only thing left that's real, the only thing we haven't wiped out (yet) with our technology. No matter what the weather is, it calls to me. I grow out of the weather the way a plant grows out of a seed. The weather is my mother, my father, my lover, my gods. Every day a storm of weather, whether rainy or sunny or cloudy. These storms of realness. If it rains rain, it's a prayer. If it rains sun, it's a prayer. It's always raining, you see.
June 25 (late morning)
The drum-beats of the rain (rain-beats).
Then, suddenly, the rain starts coming down
June 27 The unnecessary death of trees. I wake up to the brutal sound of the human tool that cuts them down. Through the early-morning drizzle, and stopping the birdsongs, I hear that horrible sound—like a long, low-pitched buzzing of a tortured, mutant fly. This rain that gives life to trees is the same rain that falls on the men who cut the trees down. So many generations of trees, gone. Once this neighborhood was a great old forest. I think of all those individual trees, how concrete and neon (and the very house I live in) have taken their place. Every time they cut down another one, I can feel the tree-ghosts hovering over us, I can hear them crying out. Their voices are carried in the rain, the rain holds their memory.
July 1 All day today the sun was hidden behind the clouds, like an unopened present. Cloudy days are pregnant with what's hidden, with what's yet to come. Then the smell of the July rain outside my opened window, as sweet and haunting as the smell of a lover's skin.
July 16 Thunders, and flashflood-like rains over our city this early morning during the dark, sleep-time hours. I didn't sleep, of course, couldn't—except in nightmarish, feverish-like clumps of 10 minutes. I'd slip off into one of those clumps, and then be awakened by the sky cracking open and roaring...almost the sound of the sky whipping the whole city, punishing it, for slipping into summer. Then the downpour would come, roaring louder than the thunder, as if it were a desert's once-a-year rain or a tropical rain storm. Then after the downpour, quiet, utter quiet...until the next round.
July 30 Cloudy, with a thin veil-like drizzle this morning…but maybe back into the 80s again by tomorrow. This cloudy/drizzly weather distorts sounds. The bird's song just now sounded like a cordless phone ringing. And the plane above that's preparing to land (flying below the clouds in the drizzle) sounds like a monster moaning.
August 4 Lightning like knives, like knives cutting the sky to pieces, and it roars all over this part of the city. It's splitting trees apart, starting fires, and it keeps coming and coming, the electrical madness, the thunderous poundings. My house shakes, my internal organs shake, and the flashes & snappings & cracklings & boomings keep on, non-stop. Hailstones fall, traffic on the bridge is backed up. It keeps coming and staying and not leaving, right overhead, my body fully charged. It feels like the end of the world.
September 10
Summer-into-fall is calling.
September 14 It felt like the heart of summer today, it was in the upper 80s, but in between the warm breezes I could feel fall slipping in, I could feel it whispering its sad lovely secrets. And in that whispering a memory came to me… I'm a teenager, sitting in the back row of the dark movie theater, holding hands with the "rebel without a cause", knowing no one will know or find out, and delighting in this as he whispers his loneliness into my ear… I felt fall slipping in like that today, like a hand holding on to mine when it's not supposed to. In the dark spaces of my solitude where no one can see me, fall's hand touched mine and whispered beautiful sadnesses while summer kept on trying to smile. It feels like falling in love, this anticipation of fall. FALLing in love, loving to fall.
September 23 Warm days one after another. Night, now. I just looked up at the curtained window and saw the near-full moon through the crack between the fabric and the leaded glass. Perfectly the moon was centered in one of the window's squares. I'm looking at the moon right now, watching the gray craters floating still-ly on the white ball of light. Outside the other window, the pear tree drops more pears. I hear them bouncing on the grass, or splitting open on the brick walkway as they fall. Now the moon is moving slowly to another square in the leaded glass window. It's past midnight, and everything is slowed way down.
September 29 Just now I was outside, observing the last of the fruit falling from the plum tree. There were some plums on the grass, and in one very ripe one, a bee was thrusting its whole body in & out of the plum, as if it was making love to it with its full nature. As it buried its whole body into the sweetness of the fruit, and stayed in there for a long while, it became part of the plum. Its way of "making love" was to transfer the plum's nature into its own. Everything I write is dipped into Nature—my own or the bigger One. My pen is like that bee, and what I fly out with in words is my own nature transformed by something bigger than myself. All I can do with my life is throw myself in, and emerge with what that obsession and abandonment has given me. All I can do is make love to what I don't understand.
November 16 It rains and it rains and it rains and it rains. The sun sets earlier and earlier these days, but it's as if it's always setting, it's so dark, dark, dark all day. In the afternoon, sometimes, when there's a drizzle rather than a downpour, the crows land on the tops of tall trees and fill the bare branches, like leaves. They sing their rough songs as the wind roughly sways the branches they're on, but they don't fall off. They just keep singing their rough songs. And now there's mist and fog moving in, surrounding the treetops, moving through the branches like ghosts. I am being readied for Winter.
November 21 A clearing today—no rain. I saw the blue sky! I felt the sun on my skin! It was like being let out of jail for the day, like freedom for a day. Early afternoon, while walking in the neighborhoods where old trees are taller than the office buildings in the distance, I saw and heard hundreds of birds at the tops of the tall trees. It sounded like spring, though I had never before heard so many birds singing at once in any season. I had to stop and just listen to the wild music of it. I was suddenly in a huge aviary. Then early evening, while I was walking up the steps to my house, I saw the full moon eerily peeking through the cedar trees like a movie scene from an early 19th century novel.
November 26
This nearly-constant November rain.
No one can escape the weather.
But at night the rain-wet streets are transformed
into mirrors,
November 30
November has been a rain party all month long.
Go home, November, go home—
Copyright © 2000 by Olivia Dresher
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