Rain and Tears

Sunrise over the ocean?

No, instead it is a streetlight lit automatically over a parking lot during a dark midafternoon thundershower.

They have those things here; at least this week they do. The weather has been very dry for weeks, but this area (can't bring myself to say "we") has had a spate of thundershowers rolling through the area. The sun comes up, the sun is overshadowed by lumpy clouds, the dark gray shreds blow in, and with a light and sound show, rain buckets down like the scenes in the beginning of "The Matrix" or movie scenes of a storm at sea.

I savor the storms when they arrive; we don't have them in the Central Valley, not very often, anyway -- maybe five or six in a decade. While this storm was going on, I was completely countercultural and opened the drapes of the window-wall of my hotel room all the way, turned the chairs to face out and watched the storm play across the hills.

My mother always told me that I was born during a thunderstorm; I've often wondered if there is some connection between that and my overwhelming sleepiness when I start to hear the peals of noise following lightning. I relax, I'm filled with a sense of well-being, I want to curl up and smile, and drift into dreams.

But not like the dreams I had last night, that were the most horrible and ugly and heart-breaking that I have ever had in my life. The emotions of the dream bled over into my waking, so that my chest hurt with the sadness, and just pondering the images of the nightmare turned me to bitter, hopeless tears. I wept through my morning shower, and though I felt less pain after the tears, I was periodically moist-eyed throughout the day.

No thunder-dreams that one. I know the well-spring of that dream: all the emotions that rage and chase each other through my days here. Fury, frustration, guilt, fear, regret, the fleeting wisps of hope, the deep piteous gratitude for passing words of kindness, the disappointment of the low moments -- God, I feel like a war zone, a black and white movie image of the trenches of World War I. Weren't they always in the rain, too? As if the soldiers dug into their deep, gravelike earthen protections in fear and misery needed downpours to drown their wounded as they lay beside them?

I don't mind the rain on my journey here. I wish it would thunder at night loud enough to penetrate this nearly sound-proof hotel room and send me uplifting dreams. Maybe I'd wake in the morning rested and ready to attack the day, instead of going from sadness to horror to awake to the promise of more misery in the daylight.

The update today: Mom's caseworker and I hammered out a "plan" that will allow my mother to stay in her home until she screws up royally enough to unequivocally be sent to a care facility. And Jan had a stomach-feeding tube installed surgically, so that they can get that damned tube out of her poor nose. She was too groggy for me to visit her longer than necessary to find out she was doing all right, so I didn't stick around and read today.

Mom didn't answer her phone when I called her. Oh well.