Sturm und drang

I sat for an hour in a roomful of meditating people. I bought mint Lifesavers, razor blades, and ibuprofen at the ubiquitous corner drugstore. I cleaned the inside of the Ranger. I sat, I bought, I cleaned. Not exactly Caesar's dispatch from Gaul, but not a bad start for a nice quiet Sunday in central swingstate.

Then I ate breakfast on the patio while reading the Sunday paper. When I couldn't put it off any longer, I set to work reducing a big pile of branches on the lawn to smaller stacks of sticks. Seeking but not finding a faster way to do this, I kept at it until the pile began to dwindle and I could almost envision getting it done. Meanwhile, the wind from Hurricane Ike howling across the continent from Texas was getting louder and stronger all the time.

While taking a break, I heard a loud CRACK and turned in time to see a big pear tree topple to the ground, falling right across the brick walkway but missing the fence by inches. This was the second trunk of a three-trunk tree. I cut down the first trunk several weeks ago, and its remnants are what I'm currently cleaning up. It looks like I'm not as nearly finished as I thought.

Rather than trim off the branches and cut it into logs now, I decided to keep stripping the existing ones and finish one before I start the other. But the wind kept getting more rawkus, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stand under the maple tree back by the compost heap. I heard a branch get ripped from another maple near the house, so I took another break to pull it off the little dawn redwood it had landed on.

The windstorm is a roar by now, whipping trees every which way, but clearly coming form the south. It looked like the third trunk of the pear tree would go any minute, the way it was bending over the garage. A couple of secondary limbs - branches of branches - came down in the front yard, so I dragged them into a small pile out of anyone's way.

The power was out, so I figured we'd better cook something while it's still light outside, and I started a pot of lentil soup. I was inside when I heard the first big thud, and a huge limb from the big maple in front landed on the concrete slab of the front porch. I decided I wouldn't go in the front yard for a while. Gven and I settled into the den to read the paper out of harm's way, but the sound of the storm - no rain, no thunder, just wind - made us look up every time we heard a gust or a crack.

A few more big limbs came down in the front yard; we were lucky only small, leafy branches landed on the roof. After the wind calmed down a bit, we went out and untangled nature's random, mutant pruning, most of it lying parallel in a north-south line next to the living room, the biggest a few feet from the front door. We dragged them off the sidewalk so the mailman can get through and stacked the bulk to be cut up later.

By this time it was dark inside, so Gven dug a few candles out of the drawer in the hutch in the dining room, and we lit enough candles to have plenty of light in the kitchen and den. I called Zelda, and she was eating supper with friends who had a gas stove, since her house had no power. I called Jessi and got an update on his plans to come to Ohio and then back to New York before the cranberry harvest. Then I called Jo Jo to see if she's coming up for Thanksgiving. That's a week's worth of phone calls for me.

My bodymind needed a workout after all that tree moving, so I stretched on the floor and went outside to do a taiji form. It had finally rained a little, and then the wind blew in a mild, partly clear full-moon night. As I finished the form I could see my moonshadow on the bricks. Bone tired and humming a Cat Stevens song, I'd been in bed less than a minute when the power came back on.