christmas eve afternoon

The dry grass is trembling against the fence. The leaning bit of fence at the edge of the yard where it drops into the empty lot next door. Someone is building a storm outside. They're gathering up cedar branches and shaking them. Shaking them hard so that rain sprays everywhere. They're dragging a crumpled bluegreen ribbon of sea around the horizon, like a discarded evening gown hooked around a muddy boot. They're blowing giant mouthfuls of white pipesmoke into the glass bowl of the sky until everything is obscured.

This morning, before the rain, I looked out and saw the sea frozen into thick storm ridges. From this distance, it was completely immobile, as though time's engine had iced over. The cedar trees, though, were still shaking. Just shaking out their shoulders. Getting ready. They shook and rain fell on the ocean, and it began to move again, the tiny waves pulling hard north, an army of little energies. Each layer of waves running over the next largest set of waves as over a landscape, each landscape just the layer slithering over the one beneath, a world in which nothing is still or solid for a moment.

Which nothing is. Happy Christmas, for those who like that sort of thing. I invite you all to enjoy the storm.

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