The Weather
"There was a rip in the sky over the bay this morning, a ragged tear in the grey flesh of Heaven that revealed the pearly bone and the glowing yellow subcutaneous fat of the Celestial Body."
The first of Elmore Leonard's Ten Things Writers Should Never Do is "open with talk about the weather." I dislike this rule because the weather is something that holds endless fascination for me. The wind blows where we live; it blows everywhere, I know, but at our house, you can feel it wrap itself around the house as it scours across the hilltop. It can't get in -- it tries, oh how it tries -- all we can feel is the pressure of its frustration of having to alter its course in order to pass around our house. Out on Commencement Bay, the wind kicks up whitecaps and makes the dark water of the bay an unstable, roiling surface. You can see quite a ways up the Sound between Brown's Point and Vashon Island; there is quite a bit of sky to watch how the wind whips the cloud cover between the spits of land.
The days are getting longer. I drive along the water to the train station. Melissa thinks it is a slower route than banging through town down 30th, but I have always countered with the fact that the drive along the water is more interesting. Dawn is creeping close as I make that drive these days, and the gold and red light of the morning sun is starting to color the sky over the water. It is always different and I always tell myself I need to leave a few minutes earlier so that I can stop and take a picture of the sky and water.
If we move out into the valley, I'm going to really miss this drive and I'm trying to decide if the loss of my time with the sea and sky in the morning is something worth fighting for. I shouldn't be writing about the weather so it might as well be invisible. But that isn't true; life would be more pallid without the weather, we would be one step closer to being shuffling corpses without being aware of the wind and the sky.