After the storm

Dad's mound


Unfuckupable Man

Storm damage


There was a storm last night. It seems as if there’s been one every other night. It’s the big danger with storm “warnings.” The sirens go off three or four times a week or three or four times a night, and you get complacent. You think someone in the house must be paying attention. When I came up from watching TV in the basement, where you don’t know what the hell is going on, the siren sounded for about the third time. I did stop and listen. Then Mia said she was heading home and I told her, “Be careful out there.” She said she’d just tuned in and the storm was moving beyond us.

This morning I walked around checking the yard. As far as I can tell, only one smallish limb fell – not that it wouldn’t have been dangerous if you were standing where it landed. I took a picture of it and, while I was at it, I took a few more. Being able to capture those pictures of the morning shadows yesterday got me really jazzed. Now I’m probably hooked.



I think my photo of Unfuckable Man is going to be really good. He guards the entrance to the woods and looks really different when he’s wet. This morning he’s soaked through. My friend Terry sculpted him and sent him to me, complete with the name. He said he’d just started working on him when he gouged the wood and thought it was ruined. Then this thought he didn’t think popped into his head and it was that the wood was unfuckupable. I got the gift the morning after I’d returned from a presentation on A Course of Love that I thought, kind of in that same way, that I’d “ruined.” I was lying in bed in a mood of regret and feeling sick when Donny came home and carried in this huge package. He said, “Who’d be sending you something from Florida?” He opened it up for me and I read the note. It was one of those laughing and crying at the same time moments.



The other one I took was of Dad’s mound. The summer before dad died, my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway and asked Donny if he’d like the dirt that was getting plowed up. It got put out behind the fence near the cabin and the idea was that I’d shovel it around the area and then maybe plant some seeds. The mound was what was leftover when I got tired of the project.

After dad died, I kept looking out at that mound that looked just about like a recently filled grave and decided it would have to stay. It became Dad’s mound and I plant it with moon flowers (for his love of the moon).

I’m still really lazy about that kind of thing. I added a little fresh black dirt before planting this year, but not enough to really make a difference. The moon flowers were having a pretty rough time of it anyway, and today they’re pretty battered by the storm.



I thought afterwards, “These are all storm pictures” … not just in being taken “after a storm” but by being of those things that come to you in stormy times. You place them and plant them and make them into subjects rather than objects. They have meaning to you and you really, really love them. They also remind you not to get too complacent. Maybe love and complacency just don't go together.