Howling

Reading comfortably, cat on my lap, I was too lazy tonight to close the living room blinds, and so I looked out around 8:30 to see the moon just about full--or fully full? Clear sky after days of rain and slipped white clouds behind it, the kind that take on a shade close to brick just where the darkness resumes, and then a thin strip of gray cloud--steel gray, or darker--that seems to cross the moon itself.

Nothing happens, just a little movement, a little more, and still, it's fascinating. The moon is cupped in the frilly, still-bare branches of my neighbor's tree--willow? poplar? elm? I'll have to ask her. Something light, and this is the upper twigs (we're talking, after all, about the moon) and still, somehow, black lace against a deep blue sky, the spindly upper branches seem ready to take its weight if needed. The neighbor is a friend, a colleague, a person whose company I enjoy, one who has offered comfort in a time of terrible grief--she seems, in short, like the sort of person whose front yard tree would support the moon's weight, and more.

And then the moon rises further, the clouds slip south, and the sky behind the moon is like the deep blue velvet of my mother's first formal dress, one I could never really fit into properly, but loved.

And then I turn away from the window to help my daughter with her Spanish homework. When I look back, the moon is entirely gone, the sky is black: we live on a planet with neither moon nor stars. Perhaps the eternal darkness has begun.

But the cat is still stretched out on my lap, one leg extended languidly across my shin, a hind paw desultorily raised, tail lost under my book. He must weigh twelve pounds by now, maybe more. My legs, resting on a hassock, are starting to go numb.

Cheating? This is the moon from my apartment
in Rosario. But it is the moon, and I did take the picture.

The moon might return. There's a near glow to the puff of cloud just beyond the neighbor's tree. We had hail today (heavy, like someone in the sky pouring out a spent beanbag chair, shaking the white pellets down with a vengeance) and sunshine (enough for a good run) and more hail, a little wind. There's no reason to think, after dark, the weather will hold still until morning. So the moon might be back; later, it might be bright enough, outside, to read.

This isn't a story. But it might be where a story begins.

Imaginary Weather (running and writing)

I have gone back to a draft of a story that takes place on a hot day. A really hot day. 

Today is not a hot day, not where I live, and it is taking a strenuous effort to muscle my imagination anywhere near air shimmering over asphalt, t-shirts sweaty around necklines, glare that makes you squint. Anything more inventive than the clichéd sizzle of eggs on the pavement.

If I want to sweat today, I have to run. If I run, under (or over) the sweatiness, I will be cold. Not freeze-your-eyelashes-together cold (thank goodness I no longer live in that climate) but throat-stinging cold, tug-my-fleece-beanie-a-little-lower-on-my-ears cold. Most of all, mud puddle cold. Only in the winter is the much vaunted ventilation of my running shoes really evident. The air goes right through them, along with the water when I inevitably misjudge as solid one of the floating islands that decorate the jogging-trail-cum-mud-wallow where we crazies congregate. Kind of the local variation on mad dogs and Englishmen, here where there's not much midday sun this time of year.

So, I'm going to run (because it clears my head even if it sogs my toes) and I'm going to try, flexing my leg muscles, to push that mental muscle back toward that hot afternoon when my story is supposed to start, the heat that is somehow motivating to my character (how? when has she ever experienced heat that would make you choose? where does she live, anyway?). 

I know that more than a few of my brilliant insights-while-running are lost among the woodchips before I get home--how else to explain the recalcitrance of certain drafts that stubbornly resist revision? So I don't run too fast, hoping any laggard inspiration might have the chance to catch me up before I round the bend. But as a plan, a run right now seems more promising than one more sunny-side-up stuck on the metal bus stop bench in my little urban desert that refuses, today, to be more than a mirage.