Rain Coming

The shifting clouded sky looks haunted, distressed.  It's streaked with tattered shreds that look like dreams and nightmares, vaporized and drifting aimlessly.  Ominously fantastic clouds are stretched from one corner to the other of the heavens.

There is a heavy swell piling up on rocks and shoreline, overwhelming tidal pools and then draining out in gurgling rivulets.  Long heaving rushes of water, each one going further up the shore than the last, have interludes of silence between them, as if they are pausing to consider staying or returning once again.    

The air stinks of guano and rotting seaweed, nearly palpable in its density, at lower tidal zones, in areas shielded from currents and waves.  When the breeze blows, it's edge is cool and sobering.

An encounter between warm, heavily moist clouds from the south west and cold impatient currents from the northeast are meeting at the shore, high overhead.  Today the sky is haunted with sad memories, sagging with regret, weeping with remorse.  Teardrops of rain are flowing, running, trickling down the hillsides, eventually joining the salted depths of ocean waiting at the shore.  The swells gather them into their arms, forgiving, grateful.

Gone Missing

How odd.  The laundry is all clean again, but there are five socks without  partners.  The hampers are empty, the floor is picked up.  He and I wore two socks apiece, each day, one pair at a time every day, but now there are three white socks and two dark ones that don't match anything else.

It makes me think other things could be going missing that I may not be noticing.  And Halloween is coming, you know.

I started thinking of this about 15 minutes ago when I was folding the laundry and putting things away.  As I thought about it, a sudden wind sprang up outside and all the windchimes started thrashing around and, well, chiming.  Pretty spooky.  I guess, though, on a scale of 1 to 10, it's about a 2 or so.  But, could it mean something?

The unexpected things that happen without warning seem a little creepy this time of year, a mood prompted by neighbors who have strung fake spider webs in massive quantities in their yards and by all the pumpkins showing up everywhere.  I mean, where do those darned pumpkins come from anyway?

Weird things happen, like lightbulbs that pop suddenly right overhead, a bottle that falls off a shelf in the bathroom, a pile of magazines that gives way and slides to the floor.  No warning, just goes.  Makes you want to, you know, DO something.

I'm not a person given to wild screaming and panic.  No, I'm the opposite.  Dead calm, like the albatross around the Ancient Mariner's neck.  Or something.  If I get a little on edge, you can imagine that truly nervous people would be vaulting into total bug-eyed hysteria.  My approach is:  Admire their energy, which is really something to see, and then settle down with a good book.

A few missing socks do not seem like cause for panic, and yet it does give one a sense of unease.  It is perplexing, you know, to have an ever-increasing supply of singletons no matter how careful you are about your laundry routine.  I'm going to chalk it up to a little spirit, a trickster having some fun.  I'll leave the screaming and panic for times when I might need them.  Like if suddenly the socks' partners appear.