I feel like the little boy I saw in a television commercial once who announces, "I'm leaving, now!" He inches toward the door, and periodically stops to look back to see if anyone is noticing his imminent departure. "I'm leaving now!" His mom watches this small scene play out, smiles and goes to him with open arms. He runs to meet her. "I'm back! Did you miss me?"
This is the account, recovered from a lost post, of one of the times I took a blog sabbatical, only to return the next day! It was posted originally on October 13, 2004.
Something happened today.
Our front door was open to the cool autumn air. I peered out, and felt suddenly rooted to the spot. "Look, Buck, look! Oh, God, it's so beautiful!" Buck walked toward me. "What is it, sweet baby?"
We walked out on the screened porch. It had been emptied of lawn furniture in anticipation of Luke the Power Washer coming the next day to remove Hurricane Ivan-etched dirt.
Buck saw it, too. The bright orange sun ball melted into the tree line and a young doe stood in silhouette in the darkening landscape. She looked at us, motionless. We didn't move, either, and the sweet fragrance of the mint I planted just by the wind-lost screen door wafted under our noses.
The beauty is back. It never went away, only temporarily my ability to see it. The brokenness is all I could see, and my words dried up.
There was rain yesterday. It settled the dust and my spirit. And so, with heartfelt thanks to you all for your kind expressions and best wishes, like the little boy, "I'm back!" Shortest sabbatical on record.
I bought a flat of tiny copper penny violas yesterday, a dozen candy corn orange and yellow marigolds, eight blue-colored snapdragons, two tiny globe-shaped miniature thujas, several decorative kale plants so ugly they are cute, two strawberry plants and a glamorous blooming red bromeliad.
Buck and Harold worked all day with chain saw and tractor to cut and drag off the trees busted up by September's big storm.
Bell South called to confirm our phone is working properly. "On, no, it's not," I said, over a loud buzzing noise on the line."No?" The nice young man seemed puzzled. "Are you at the pole on the street?" I asked. "Oh, no, I'm downtown," he said. "Well, if you were at the street, you would see there is a tree down with a tangle of phone line woven through it, snapped off from the pole."
"Ah," he said. "We'll send someone."
Our house plan. The old trees. Blooming wild flowers. A pond about to be dug. A grand piano -- the special gift from my love that I would never have dared to dream of even alone in the deep dark night under the covers. Books. Writing. A garden. Moonlight swims. The fragrance of an old-fashioned rose garden.
Hurricane Ivan's wind-driven fingers vandalized this freshly painted dream canvas.
The ugliness made us feel like running away. Everywhere there is rubble. Everywhere holes punched in our community and those nearby; trees knocked down, ripped and shredded. Even now, with convoys of workers filling up trucks with storm debris fifteen hours a day, it is dangerous to travel on many roads. Twisted sheet metal is pushed into road edges, mixed in with fallen trees, chopped up branches, sodden mattresses, drowned appliances, mildewed rolls of carpet and moldy upholstered chairs.
It is unremittingly ugly. For now.
We joined friends for dinner Saturday night at McGuire's Irish Pub, a Pensacola institution. It survived, unlike my favorite retail store, Joe Patti's Seafood, which is closed until further notice. Another couple was invited to join us for dinner, but one of them fell ill during the day. They are staying in a motel for now, their Bayshore Road home totaled. Can you imagine riding out the storm, as they did, climbing ever higher until precariously balanced in the attic, clinging to one another as the water rose and the wind screamed, picking up heavy furniture collected over a lifetime and reducing it to toothpick-size bits? Believing you are about to die. Our friend's illness may be a post-traumatic event stress syndrome. There's a lot of it going around.
Our house plan is almost complete. The fellow drawing it is an expert in roof trusses. He is needed to help get roofs back on businesses and homes, a necessary first priority. Even when our plan is complete, subcontractors and building supplies will still be scarce as hen's teeth for some time to come.
We have pondered what to do for the next year or so. Whether to abandon our dream of Longleaf Preserve. Whether to move back to North Carolina or to Colorado or to Pennsylvania or to Point Clear, Alabama.
When we walked again today over the cleared roads, I involuntarily exclaimed. "Look at the trees. Wow!" this time, I wasn't thinking of the poor demolished old ones, but the little ones, planted over the past two years. They were jumping up in the sunshine.
Here's the deal. We have a chance to buy a house just down the road that will give us the space we need to have all our stored stuff sent down from the warehouse in North Carolina and give us the comfortable stretching out space to plan carefully for Longleaf's restoration and the expansion of our permanent home there. We're looking into it.*Note from the future. . . we stayed put in the existing cottage and left our furniture from the North Carolina house in storage until construction was complete. It spent almost two years in storage. You can imagine how happy we were to finally have all "our things about us."
I don't want this web log to be just a personal journal. I want to work on learning to be a better story teller and a better writer. I'm going to be working on that in private screeds, rants, and reveries -- not here. Maybe something will come of it. What I want to do in this space is to tell the story of Longleaf and my life with Buck.
And about that sunset. Damn, it was beautiful.


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