Ah, fall!
Leaves flash gold and red. The
afternoon sun slants lower and earlier. Recipes appear in the newspaper for
green tomato pie. Rose and dahlia cuttings get thinner. Smoke wafts from wood
stoves. School's started, so neighbor kids don’t play flashlight tag past my
bedtime. Folks lock their cars and doors against zucchini-growing neighbors.
If March comes in like a lion, what
to use as the metaphor for the first big storm of the season in the Pacific Northwest ? It’s loud and it’s scary, like a crowd scene where
no one knows what’s going on and no one’s in charge and something bad will
happen. It’s November, and the temperature’s dropped twenty degrees over the
past day and a half.
Slabs of grey clouds push north.
Flurries of pear and apple leaves flee across the yard, mount the fence, and
race up the alley. Across the street,
poplars and bright yellow elms bend in the gusts, and everywhere spruce, cedar,
ponderosa and even giant Douglas firs writhe and dance and whip around like crazed
dervishes.
I'm crazy, too. I climb out the
upstairs window and begin to crawl across my sloped roof. Time to clean out the
gutters. The asphalt shingles are gritty and wet from the rain which is
half-hearted, annoying, and more spitting than falling. I slide bottom-first to
the roof edge to retrieve the hose that I’ve tossed up here, cleverly I
thought, hooking the trigger of the sprayer on the lip of the gutter. Now, it
hisses a small stream of water in my direction. My perch worries me. The wind
blusters in arrhythmic blasts. My weakening confidence plays games with my
balance. Clumsy duck boots provide precious little purchase. The ground looms
thirty feet beneath me.
“Be careful,” says my wife helpfully
from below. Yeah, right.
