February and March

I like a good storm. Crashing thunder and lighting, driving sheets of rain. That adrenaline rush when you think of something that is perhaps not quite up for the challenge, followed by the physical rush out in the driving rain to check on aforementioned thing. The relaxation of knowing that the thing is finally secure, and you can come back in the house, slap on five hours of Bach on the CD changer, make hot cocoa and read books with Amalia, or paint paintings with Amalia, or whatever.

I like snow, too, so long as I don't have to deal with the daily realities of living with it. I love to watch it fall, I like the look of a fresh snow. I love to ski and snowshoe and all of that.

Beyond those things, winter is for the birds. Or not. They have the sense to fly to Mexico, or at least Northern California (which must seem like Mexico to the poor birds that do not have enough sense to realize that Canada really is uninhabitable).

So you can imagine my elation when the weather turns warm around here in January and February. I forget that it is nothing more than a temporary respite, that we will have more winter in February and even into March. In fact we usually get our last winter storm in March.

But it's not those storms that bug me. It is the gray, the threat of storms that never come, or only come as weaklings, dropping just enough rain to make driving dangerous and being outdoors unpleasant without eskimo gear.

Today was one of those horrid gray days. It ended up fine. We had a discussion after mass about the Creed (part of the Lenten discussion series at The National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi) and even had a few good hours in Golden Gate Park. We went to the Queen Wilhelmina Garden, walked on Ocean Beach (one of those sublimely beautiful yet utterly terrifying places that has haunted me in my dreams for years - a wide expanse of sand with threatening waves. This is the edge of North America, and it does indeed feel edgy, and not in a hip, self-conscious way, but in a all-westward-bound-mythology-stops-here sort of way. If you pick up and blaze a new path, you get wet, eaten by sharks or carried out into the bitterly cold ocean by a rip current), crossed every bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden, explored the botanical garden (especially the primitive plant section and the New Zealand section), and chased each other around the park.

So, all in all, it was a very good day. But there was some melancholic note to the whole thing, with the gray skies and cold wind.

We watched a large, fully laden container ship enter the Golden Gate. It was like a menacing ghost ship, big, dark, and plodding. I could imagine a swarm of ravens over it, like some Romantic effect in a Disney film. There were a couple of homeless men huddled against the leeward side of the sea wall (a scary structure of reinforced curving concrete that invites the imagination to picture all sorts of monster storm waves pounding the Great Highway).

Even earlier, in warm and comfortable North Beach, there was a melancholia in the air. I was an usher and went outside to hand out programs. My thoughts got lost in a field of gray, only to be snapped out of it when some friends came up the stairs. I went in with them to notice that mass had already begun. Not too far into it, just the Collect, but I never do that. Somehow I missed the bell, did not look in to see the procession gathering, etc.

And so it will be for another month or so. Sure we will get some amazing spells of warm weather, with warm evenings, even, but they will fade and the next gray spell will come as a surprise. Again.

At this point I would welcome a good rain storm. Nothing disastrous (we have had enough of those in the last few years around here), but something to really say, "it is raining. For real. Not just threatening."

I have some Bach that I want to listen to.

So that is my motto for the day, "Give me Bach or give me 100 degree weather!"

Posted by erik at February 14, 2005 12:37 AM | TrackBack