Are we crying uncle yet?

Mother Nature on Steroids

“I don’t know how you get dressed if you live in Wales because it’s pouring rain and then it’s hot sunshine, and then it might hail.  It’s just so confusing.”

                                  Piper Perabo

         I’m beginning to believe that Mother Nature has some dreadful mental disorder.  Saturday, when I was manning the information booth at the Farmer’s Market at 8:30 a.m., the temperature was 95 degrees.  Today, it’s 58.  Here in Alabama, we were in severe draught with no measurable rainfall in the last month and temperatures in the high nineties since the beginning of May.  Now, thanks to Lee, my backyard has standing water.  My dogs have to swim out to do their business.  Texas is apparently burning down, Vermont is assessing the damage from the last tropical storm, Virginia is picking up the pieces after an earthquake, while another category three hurricane is headed for the Caribbean.  Wonder what the Old Girl is mad about?  Wonder if she’s off her medication?

        

         I could wax poetic.  I found this lovely quote this morning: “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colors to my sunset sky.”  (Rabindranath Tagore)  That’s poetic and all and on another day I might run with it, but not today.  Today I’m grouchy from being house bound by Old Mother.  I’m not impressed by her pretty skies or her sunny days when they mean I can’t poke about in the botanical gardens and do my summer meandering.  Mother Nature is acting like some mongrel despot that takes pleasure in zapping her minions for lifting their eyes from the task.  I guess I’m having a little tantrum of my own.

         This sort of summer is a good reminder of just how helpless we are in the face of nature.  Watching, as we do too often in this neck of the woods, what one tornado can do in sixty seconds, keeps us humble and respectful in attitude if not in actions.  Mother Nature is still the Big Woman.  She can still put us intelligent folks in our place pretty darn quick.  And she’s on a rampage right now.  Duck and run.

                                  Keeping my head down,

                                  Jane