Eccentric Flower:201003/Sun and Rain

I reorganized the journal page the other day for a number of small reasons, and I added the phrase, "If I go a fortnight without a new entry here, you are entitled to poke me to see if I'm dead." Of course, I didn't look at the date of the most recent entry when I added that.

So. Um. I'm not dead. (And I haven't exactly been silent, either; I post anywhere from one to ten things on Twitter every day.)

Last weekend (actually, the weekend before last, since I am writing this on a Monday - I mean the weekend of the thirteenth and the vicinity thereof), it rained for four solid days. Two of the nights there were high winds. One of those nights, winds of above sixty miles per hour were reported.

We get a slight amount of water in our basement every so often - slight, as in, five minutes and a mop can take care of it - but we have only had serious, measurable-with-a-ruler flooding twice in ten years. The first was about five, six years ago. The second was this storm.

We don't have a sump because you don't bother putting in a sump when your basement sees serious water every five years. And frankly I don't understand the idea of pumping flood water into the ground, because if we flood, it means the ground is already so saturated that it's just going to come right back in.

Of course, I'm sure there are disadvantages to what we did - pump it into the sewers by way of the sink, especially since they were already well over capacity too. But what are you supposed to do with it? Pump it into an enormous holding tank you happen to have lying around? Pump it out into the yard over and over until the rain stops? Don't try to remove any water until the rain stops?

Fortunately we had a gift of a Noble Shop-Vac which we had never used. It sure as hell is used now. For two days, every hour or so, we'd remove 100 or so gallons of water. We'd rest a while and do other things. Then we'd go back down and do it again. I didn't go to work Monday or Tuesday of last week. On Tuesday I was in the basement, throwing out sodden boxes, scraping up dead linoleum tiles (they were long overdue for removal anyway) and, of course, vacuuming water, for five hours.

On Wednesday the weather turned beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. Blue cloudless skies and temperatures sixty degrees and upward. On Saturday when we went out to see Shmuel I wore sandals and one of my light summer shirts. A lovely June day. This is the New England weather toying with us, you see.

But for two or three days I was experiencing a peculiar emotion that I don't get nearly enough of. On one of the afternoons - Wednesday, Thursday, I don't remember which - I had had a good lunch and I had gone to buy books and I wasn't planning on going back to the desk and I felt this particular emotion so strongly that it made me just want to walk around giggling.

No, not exactly joy.

I hold, you know, that the core of the human psyche, for better and worse, is displayed in very small children. Everything that makes us what we are is there, the good and the bad, in raw form for the world to see. Everything we do after that in our lives is learning to conceal or suppress or overcome what we are born with - like applying successive layers of paint to a wall over the course of many years until you've forgotten what color the wall was originally.

Of course the bad parts are obvious, especially if you're a parent. Small children are near-perfect megalomaniacs. The universe revolves entirely around them and their wants and their needs, and they see no reason to conceal that. This is the part of child behavior that makes me despair for humanity, because as adults, we are still those little egoists inside, it's just a question of how well we manage to work around it. Makes one wonder how we survived as a species.

But we shouldn't forget the good parts, and for me the best good part of the child-nature is when you see a small child go into a sort of fugue state, staring wide-eyed at everything and nothing in particular, not making any noise but definitely and utterly engaged, just trying to take it all in as fast as he possibly can, and you know he's thinking

This is the most wonderful thing I have ever seen.

And the next day - sometimes, the next minute - he'll do it again. Doesn't matter what. It could be the lights of a supermarket. It could be some colorful distraction. It could be his father's smile. One never knows. But the sense of wonder is just amazing to watch. This is all so great. What a great world full of cool stuff!

I had a lot of that on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday. And I needed it. I wish I could remember how to get into that state more often. I used to be able to do it pretty readily. These days it's harder to do.

And now it is Monday and it's overcast again and I think it is going to rain, and there's bad news everywhere I look, and I want to curse at people for being enthusiastic about the wrong things and unenthusiastic about the right things, and people are dying or threatening to die, and I'm completely drained of energy once more, and on top of that, while I was out enjoying the weather and having the wonderment, I didn't get much work done, and now I have several days of backlog to try to cram in.

I don't regret playing hooky last week even one little tiny bit, though. I know what's valuable.