the last blue iris

 Yesterday J. did the math (i.e., ask Siri) and figured that we've been in quarantine for 349 days. My Zoom profile pic is from March 13, 2020, and my hair is short, I am wearing makeup, I look...well, a hell of a lot younger. Though none of us really knew what lay ahead of us, and all of us were still alive then, I felt on the precipice of something. Though two weeks seemed a long time to pause the world. Then a month. Then here we are at the edge again.  In this almost-year we have had fires that blotted out the sun for days, made necessary the wearing of a  precious N95 mask the only way I could go out to feed the chickens. We've had clouds of tear gas and weeks upon weeks of protests, police brutality. I've been to family court twice ( I'm blowing this all out of proportion! etc etc). This is all in the tail end year of the Orange Dictator's rule, and then came the Insurrection. We are a week past a snowstorm to end all snowstorms, here and across the country an...

We consider it eternally boring when we talk about the weather. Small talk, what we do when we're trapped with folks we don't care about, Sure is a nice day, isn't it? Snow coming soon.  In Girl Scouts, we learned all about the clouds, how they can predict what's to come. Mare's tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships carry low sails. The way you can smell rain, or snow about to come. As a child I learned that tornadoes--that scourge of the Midwest--sounded like freight trains, and, living a block away from  the Burlington Northern tracks, shoved my fingers into my ears humid summer nights when heat lightning and distant thunder flashed outside the window, convinced we were going to float up into the clouds, or the walls cave in. In the winter, we would step outside and know immediately: snow was on the way. The light in the morning was lemony, the air smelled crisp had hard edges, the sun, even in a clear sky, always seemed wan. Seven years ago, we landed in Por...