Well this was a view of my desk a few days ago, working on an upcoming club for a shop for later in the year, but I can see the sun was shining.
Today, not so much. We had a foul night last night, downpours so heavy that it sounded like I was sleeping in the shower. Or not sleeping actually. The poor eavestroughs, which have their problems to begin with (i.e., no one has emptied them in a while!), couldn’t deal with it and were completely full, and the water from the level above gushed over the roof edge and down into those full troughs with an exuberance that I found deeply off-putting and offensive at 4 in the morning. Or anytime.
There were also huge winds. Every now and then a gust would blow in so hard that it would pick up all of the trough water and dump it back down as if someone was emptying a garbage bin of rain right outside my window. From the sound it made it was hard to think the water wasn’t going to splash in and soak toes and quilts.
And cats. Lucy tried to be brave but those biggest gusts sent her under my bed more than once.
(This is Lucy recreating the mood and scene. Actually, this sad throwback daylight picture was when I told her I was going away for a week. She does love me, my Lucy. Bit of a drama queen though.)
There are huge trees up the hill behind my house. Sometimes we have winds that whip down the mountain and those trees do come into my mind a bit when that happens. Ugh. One type of tree up there has a way of losing whole big branches that spiral through the air and come down like a spear. Again, ugh.
When the kids were little the trees on the hill closest to our house were still small, growing up again after the house construction had cleared them off. For quite a few years my husband would take the boys out and they’d pick which one to cut for a Christmas tree. They’d go up the hill with an axe and have big discussions. One year three year old David pointed towards the house and said, “How about that one?” My husband wasn’t sure what he was talking about until he looked and saw one of those huge branches sticking straight up out of our roof. Wow. When we put the pieces together we realized we had been out a few evenings before during a storm when that branch must have come down, so we missed the noise and would have had no idea for who knows how long that it was in there if it hadn’t been Christmas tree season.
This morning I came down to find that the power must have gone out at least briefly. In a cruel twist of fate my daughter had texted that she had spare block first thing, was going back to sleep and didn’t need a ride so I copied back down in my bed, but the power interruption had meant that my son who always gets himself off to work in the morning had not got a wakeup alarm and… yes… wondered if he could get a ride. Right then! Ah well. Small problems.
Downstairs the heater had gone off in the power outage so it was pretty darned cold, but now it’s getting caught up and there is a lightness in the sky. I think the worst might be over. The whitecaps on the water out front are still numerous, but they are moving up the Sound so riding a warmer wind, not the cold winds that come down the opposite way. The daffodils I saw this morning were all hanging their heads in shock and probably indignation, like a wet cat, but I guess they’ll shake it off and pull it all together again.
So I guess I’ll be inspired by the flowers and do the same. Back to work.