Conversations

While reading my blog with Lea:

Dd: "What is your password?"
Smiling Me (yay, at last I can tell someone): "It's *******."
Confused Me: "Wait, no, it's **********. Yeah, **********..... "
Dd: "Oh." (smiling) (but not seeing the big deal)

Me, hearing it out loud, it is just a word. In my head it's hilarious.

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Last evening on our walk, I was telling my husband about something I'd read that afternoon in the book I'm reading, The Monsters of Templeton by Laura Groff. I'm really enjoying this book, btw. It's complicated, but there is a brilliant young woman, an academic, who has come back to her small hometown in NY because she is pregnant by a professor who she was with as an assistant on an achaeology dig in Alaska. She tried to run over his wife with a car when the older woman arrived to confront them about their affair. Anyhow, she comes home to escape legal trouble and to decide whether or not she is going to keep "the lump" forming in her belly. And unwittingly begins to uncover a mystery her mother presents to her about her heritage. Yes, there is a monster! There are ghosts galore. It's a novel with the inclusion of many main characters from several generations, but they all kind of twist into this interconnected warming amalgam of colorful, interesting fucked-upness.

Anyhow, there is a scene in the book. Ok, her mother, who was a bohemian from the 60's, is now a born again Christian who is dating a local minister and the younger woman is not eager to accept him. Actually, she is in contempt of him for obvious reasons; not surprisingly, he's sort of an idiot. She is in quite a bit of turmoil, ofcourse, but as a personality maintains a sort of repressive, stoic demeanor with a dry humor. He has arrived for breakfast at their house one morning, in shorts and boots, and they are discussing hiking:

"Going for a hike?" I said.
"Indeed," he said. "I hear you're quite the hiker, as well."
"I was," I said. "Then I moved to San Francisco. The mountains aren't far, but you get so into your life in the city, all that excitement, all that movement, you find yourself lucky to go out into the hills once in awhile to trot around. To be honest, I have so little time, I hardly ever go anymore..."
He looked disappointed in me, and said, "But God's good earth is what he gave us to forget our worldly cares."
I just said, "Huh," for the sake of my tired mother moving in the kitchen beyond the doorframe, without pointing out that that the earth is the world..."

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We had clear skies all day yesterday, a scorcher of summery heat with thick moisture rising from the ground and a background noise of heavy humid silence and cicadas hum. My husband came in from work and as I was tying my shoes on the porch to walk, the sun was suddenly gone and I thought I heard thunder. I yelled in the door, "Honey, can you check the radar?" A moment later he yelled back, "It's totally clear!" Hmm, the sky answered with some more distant rumbling after that.

About 5 minutes later he said, "Come and see this!" I went into the house and on the television I watched the radar as a storm cell formed right out of the blue, right over our city, bubbling outward like a rapidly dividing green zygote. And then, outside there was lightning, a bellow and a sudden downpour, a saturating din of cats and dogs.

But as fast as it came, it was gone. Before I left for my evening trek I was out in the driveway to watch the western sky, where the cerulean blanket returned to cover us with a soft sun. My daughter hollered at me from her bike as she was riding away, "I'll call you if I see a rainbow!" I watched her little tanned body pumping the cranks of that purple bike, colt-legged under blue plaid shorts, her pink-shirted back, golden hair shining and I hollered back, "I already see one!" :)