Monsters in the night
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I crawled
into bed early, barely darkish. Wasn’t feeling great. My stomach/intestines
were slightly crampy, nothing dire, just not my usual cast-iron gut. Went to
sleep with clear conscience.
Woke up to
wind that sounded like a freight train going through a tunnel at mach one
speed, bending trees, flattening crops. Lightning flashed messages of doom
across the black sky.
I got up and
closed my last open window, grabbed another blanket and tried to curl back into
sleep. The howling wind had other entertainment in store.
My mind, as
erratic as the wriggling lightning moving ever closer, insisted on considering
the fires in California. Dwelling on rains in far flung deserts of Arabia. Pondering
tropical storms in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Reflecting on floods
throughout the world, in places that never flood. Like here.
A branch
somewhere nearby snaps off a tree. Debris rattles and clacks against my brick house.
I think about my bricks, hand-made with sand. Something overturns on my patio.
I roll over
onto my other side. My hand rests near my armpit. Quite unconsciously I finger
a lump the size of a marble. We all know what that is. The Big C. My stomach
continues to cramp. Probably swollen with a tumor. My body, no doubt, is
riddled with tumors. I do a body scan. I discover pains I never knew I had.
Wind ramps
up to mach two. I wonder if my roof will hold against such force. Then a
clattering, pinging, onto the roof, against the windows. Hail.
There goes
my garden. From the safety of my bed, I take inventory. My corn, waist high,
leaves shredded. The new squash plants, eight inches tall when I went to bed.
Gone.
Green beans.
Oh, well, I’m tired of eating green beans, tender and delicious as they are. One
cannot live on green beans alone. Though Bruce the Iguana would like to and attempts
the feat. Tomatoes, shared with that bleeping squirrel. Tomorrow I would have
had enough to make a chili sauce, now I picture tomatoes, pounded to sauce on
the concrete.
Woe to my
tender little peppers. It took three plantings, pleading with pepper seeds to
sprout before they emerged and grew into toddler stage. The purple cabbage. The
Brussels sprouts which I coddled, talked baby talk, loved like my own.
Granted,
losing my little bucket garden has nothing to compare to losing a couple
hundred thousand acres of prime winter wheat. But, still, it is my garden,
petted and pampered toil of my hands.
I climbed
out of bed and snugged a cotton rug against the front door. Checked the towels
jammed under the window frames. When rains blow in from the east, every window
leaks.
Back in bed,
I thought about my hibiscus, more beautiful than ever this year. I had promised
Denise pictures tomorrow. Now the flowers will be nothing more than a drooping,
sopping mess.
Here come
the rains. Magically, the wind dies down and the rains sound beneficent, like
they are here to heal the parched earth. Now I can go back to sleep.
Or not.
My mind has
a mind to decide that now we are awake, let’s take a moral inventory. We review
all the sins, mortal and venial, of my past. One by one, they march through my
head, each insistent on a thorough overhaul. Sins of omission. Sins of
commission. Each take a place.
When I
remember that a complete moral inventory tells both sides of the story, I hear,
in Latin, remittuntur tibi peccata tua,
your sins are forgiven, and I fall asleep to the patter of gentle rain.
There is no
need to check for monsters under the bed. All my monsters sleep in bed with me.
(In the
morning, I discovered that all my fears were for naught and like Mary, Mary,
quite contrary, my garden still grew.)
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
August 27,
2020
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