Into a story and much rain
The weather has gone from six weeks of drought to heavy rain every few days. We used to have fairly predictable weather – but that was before climate changes moved us from zone 6 to zone 7 and rearranged our seasons. We’ve had at least seven inches of rain lately. We don’t get floods here from rain, although parts of Wellfleet can go under water in hurricanes and nor’easters. But we live on a hill. Oysterfest that a friend calls Octobeergest from all the drinking has come and gone. The streets are clean again and the village of tents that filled every parking lot and lined the none-too-wide Main Street have folded up and vanished and the population has returned almost to normal. Saturday night a friend gave a party and that was fun. This week I have been writing poems. Yesterday I started a short story. Today I realized I had made some mistakes and so began it all over again. I imagine it will take some time to finish, but it’s a pleasure. These days I really enjoy shorter forms. I have a general idea of the story but I’m making all the details up as I go. I kept saying we were harvesting the last of the tomatoes, but the damned plants kept producing a few rather sour fruits. Finally Woody pulled them all last weekend and put the stakes and cages away. We are finally finally on to our fall veggies every night now. Leeks last night. Tonight Swiss chard in an Italian dish with sausage, cannellini beans and pasta. I’ll be trying it for the first time. I have a lot of dishes I make frequently in the various seasons, but I like to keep adding to my repertoire – some work out and will be repeated, others, never again. Sometimes I can tell right away from a recipe that I’ll never make it; sometimes the results are disappointing; sometimes, a new recipe produces a winner. My oldest cat Sugar Ray who seems consider himself my husband went into a decline while I was mostly in bed or quiescent after the operation. Now that I am still in pain certainly but fairly active anyhow, he has come back to life. He has turned feisty and will take no guff from our female tabby Xena who is much bigger than him, perhaps almost the size of all three of our other cats put together. Sugar Ray and Puck are each struggling to sit on me more than the other. Puck had things his own way while I was down and out. Now he has to share and he is a bit jealous. Puck is an Abby; Sugar Ray is a sable [dark brown] Burmese. We had a long pause in the middle of this last storm; the sun actually came out for a while. We walked at the pier, one third of a mile from truck back to truck. It was a gorgeous day just after high tide, the bay water rushing out very fast. Several people were taking their boats out of the water for the season. Now there are few runners at the harbor so walking there is much easier for me. Basically we meet other older people walking, some with dogs. Sometimes we stop and chat. It’s all very relaxed. I walked at the harbor without a cane for the first time since my 2nd operation. It hurt but felt good. It’s beautiful at the harbor, looking back at the town on one side and into Wellfleet Bay on the other. Always boats coming or going, dinghies, fishing boats, boats set up for tourists, various size motor boats, sail boats, yachts. None of the latter still around. Mostly fishing boats afloat. Woody took a long walk by the ocean last night and there were many seals looking at him, a couple of different kinds, grey, hooded, harbor. We have hundreds always, mostly on the bay side but all the beaches on both sides. I leave them alone but enjoy seeing them. A great white shark was in Wellfleet Harbor for the first time last week, no doubt looking for seals to eat.