Passing Time

... and then, a rain began to fall outside the open door.... 

This is March. Typically not my favorite month due in large part to the fickle nature of the weather. It is always windy whether it is still cold or prematurely warm. Either a cold front is moving in or one is passing through. Yesterday was nice, partly sunny, warm enough for a t-shirt, not humid, a slight breeze as always, but in all an invigorating day to get stuff done outdoors. We rode our bikes. We cleaned up old junk that had been laying around for a decade or two. We tapped our beer that we made on the last day of the year ’12. (Regrettably it was not so successful as hoped and will most likely be used for trapping slugs or it could possibly be reduced to its primary ingredient courtesy of a bit of steam and copper.) Over all, the sunshine was good and made the day smoother and the feeling of being semi-productive was nice.

Today, however, the cold front arrived on time as the weather maps had predicted, a thin yellow line surrounded by an expanse of green. It advanced upon the state and finally reached our house. This is the problem with March, this yoyo-ing of weather that keeps consistency of doing anything outdoors at bay. In grade school so many of our class pictures were taken in March. With the wall of windows behind our desks and smiling faces there was always the rain and a drenched playground covered with Robins pulling worms from the still brown grasses of winter. 

With the finish of some rather intense weeks of doing little besides practicing the drums for the “Cabaret” project, my recent aim was to try to return to my more normal routine in farm world and to the horses. The more I do it the more I find that the being away from and being out of synch with the beasts is tough to come back to. It just takes a consistent effort to keep the horses all working well, and a few weeks off is harder and harder to come back from. Add the silly weather factor and it becomes frustration with a capital “F”. By the end of last week I actually strung two days in a row of getting to work most of them and was hoping for a good week starting today. No such luck, the rain wins again.

And so I submit to the sound of the steady rain and write, and multitask. Laundry is going, corned beef is in the crock pot, the apartment books for our units lay over the dining table and beg for my attention. Graci, the Yorkie terriorist, keeps a look out the open door to the porch and the bird feeders just beyond, ready to chase any unsuspecting squirrels away but they are hiding from the rain. Heidi, the kraut, lays behind me snoring oblivious to my wanting to be in barn world with her feet twitching as she runs in her dreams, always a puppy there. The garden seeds I ordered are here and are waiting to be planted, depending on frost predictions, and on and on ad nauseam. Things are in a bit of a limbo, all waiting with impatience, on the weather, but, the rain does sound nice.

“Beware the Ides of March”, Portia had told Julius Caesar before he left for work back long ago. He didn’t heed her warning and it was indeed a very bad day for him. It was on the 14th, the infamous ides of March, that three years ago now, my sweet gelding Atlas got a case of colic and sadly died. It seems a decade ago, the memory is still raw but has kindly been pushed back into a place that stores grief so that life can go on. So much has happened since then that grief doesn’t get to linger. Things like grand daughters make for living in the present more of the better option.

Margaret is fifteen months old now and has kept us entertained and mesmerized since her arrival. No longer a helpless infant, she is wildly independent (she thinks), has a highly opinionated fashion sense, talks without words (though she has a few words in her repertoire, she prefers to make us monkeys do things without words , and we gladly do her bidding). She loves to dance, has great rhythm, and can play a mean set of drum licks. She loves books and can be fascinated for long periods of time with them, but show her that you have an Ipad and that’s it. That, is what she wants.

It is kind of scary world we live in now, being connected to this or that with cell phones, pads, computers always beeping or drawing our attention. I am a retard at most of the tech stuff and will remain so most likely, but to watch this little kid run around programs clicking, dragging, unafraid, curious, and totally absorbed is amazing. Hers will be much different world to grow up in than mine with technologies exploding exponentially into uncharted areas and her brain is taking it all in as fast as it can. 

I supposed each generation has a bit of that to deal with, the changes that innovations and discoveries make on our lives. As a kid I was visiting my grandmother, who was very ancient I thought, and we were taking HER mother to the doctor or something and I was stunned that my great grandmother could not figure out how the door to the car opened. When I pointed this out later to my mother and questioned her about this, she enlightened me to the fact that this really ANCIENT old lady, her grandmother, had been born before cars and had spent the majority of her life in a horse and buggy world. This idea was startling to me and I had to think hard about the fact that life for folks in the past was vastly different from my own reality,  and I could not even imagine nor comprehend the possible changes in the future. It was also my first taste of realizing that I was just another being on a timeline. The thought that my birth had not been the beginning of time had really not occurred to me.

Like the water that falls from the sky, flows across the land and back into the seas, to be picked up again to become a cloud, to repeat the process over and over is what our lives are. We are all just passing through, hoping for a good ride along the way. In the big scheme of things it is a short ride and time flies. Well, that is unless one is waiting on the rain to quit and the sun to come out. Time is relative to that which you want to do or not and it is crawling right now. . .ah well, back to multitasking.

Wow, I just found some ancient cans of green bean with an expiration date of ’04. Probably not good, you think? Think they will be better off in the garbage can than testing my intestinal fortitutde.  Funny thing is, that there is no www.anything.com on it, only a telephone number and an address to mail to. Yup time flies.