What a difference an overnight drop in temperature of 30º (thirty! degrees!) makes. It was still incredibly sticky and muggy at 11p.m. last night, so we left the A/C on, but at 3a.m. I got up and turned it off (it wasn’t actually cooling/ running at this point) and went through the house opening many windows. Today it’s hazy, cloudy, and sunny all at once, 61ºF right now, with a “feels like” of 61º, too, which is quite different from yesterday afternoon’s “feels like” of 100ºF.
I’m glad, very, that the heat broke.
The sky is striated. Very subtly, but particularly lower down, in that visible third arcing toward the water, clear striations are visible. Lift your eyes high, higher, and it looks more daubed. Touched, patted, fluffed up like a duvet. Tight at the edge where it’s tucked under the horizon line, messy in the high middle, as if someone rested there for a bit and then patted and slapped the cushion covers to make them look smooth again. Didn’t work, dude. I can tell you were taking a snooze break. But that’s okay.
The trash maples keep growing. That’s not okay.
I did not do any work yesterday. That’s not okay either.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for. It’s something specific and yet I can’t name it – at all. It’s as though I’m expecting a glimpse of something, and when I see it, it will be enough to power me through. Right now, though, and every yesterday and every tomorrow, I can’t see it. Sure, someone may have left traces of being there imprinted on the sky, but it’s mere evidence of absence. It’s not the body. Habeas corpus? Nope. When I see it, I’ll know it, I’ll be able to name it – it’s that sort of thing.
Am I supposed to work humbly, in the expectation that I might be “rewarded” with a glimpse of what I think I should see? “Humbility” – as the ever-conceited Belgian Hercule Poirot put it, making fun of English faux humbleness – isn’t my strong suit, perhaps. Perhaps I’m too proud – which, as I’m on a descriptive path here which may be interpreted religiously, or at least “spiritually,” it must be pointed out is one of the deadly sins. I guess in that view my soul is in mortal danger (were I to believe in it in the first place). I sit (lurk) and wait to glimpse, I’m too proud to work humbly (blindly) without expectation of reward.
No, wait. I don’t expect reward – that was drummed out of me in childhood. Praise embarrasses me and makes me suspicious. I expect treachery or at best abandonment. But I’m craving that glimpse, the “something” that will fuel my rocket, let me escape orbit. Someone‘s been up there, patting down the duvet afterward. I’m stuck on the ground. Maybe I need to tap my inner humbility (see? I can’t do it – I make fun, get sarcastic…), or at least put pride to bed, tuck it under the covers. And yet pride – or some measure of dignity – is the only thing keeping me upright. It’s a puzzle. I can’t glimpse the answer.