It feels as if we are at sea. The lightning blinds all around me, again and again. The thunder rips through the sky in a giant, dark, growl. It shakes the house, no, it shakes the ground beneath the house. Everything quivers in the relentless rumbles that we feel crawl beneath the house and through the Earth.
We suddenly find ourselves yelling to one another over the roar of the weather, even though this morning we basked lazily outdoors in it. Now we are running all around the house, madly slamming shut windows and doors, every one of them propped open from the July heat wave that only lasted one week.
I guess that was our whole Summer.
Whole rooms are lit up in the cracks. We venture out on the back porch to witness the show that God has in store for us tonight, he seems to be reaching down to earth Himself. We cheer and jump and oooh and aaaah with each frightening surprise.
Then the rain hits, pouring heavy and wet across all the Maritimes, sending us squealing back inside. Christine says its the worst rain she's ever seen. The pond out back floods over into the potato field out front, so we take pictures, and the lightning continues through the night and well into the next day. We huddle together in the kitchen all night, smoking, drinking pots of tea and playing cribbage until no one can keep their eyes open longer.
We smoke one last joint and sleep on the couches. We can't go to bed, its the kind of weather that makes you not want to be alone in a room. The kind where someone walks you to the bathroom and waits outside the door with a candle.
*
Following morning there is finally quiet, but the whole community has this unspoken understanding of Man having been vanquished by Nature. I find this strange as I've grown so accustomed to seeing the opposite. In my lifetime this is an unfamiliar concept.
We watch in the silence as the neighbors come out, and one robin red-breast, all to assess the damage to their homes. There is a grave and somber mood among them, though the sunshine is now glistening on the wetness that is everywhere. Just everywhere. Calls are placed to professionals for repair estimates, insurance claims are filed, and their teenagers do not go in the pool.
Christine goes to inspect the basement through the door in the floor leading to the underground furnace room to see if we're flooded too, and to hook up the sump. She reports back that we are indeed wet, but not too badly, and that she couldn't get the sump hooked up because it was jammed with something.
This reminds me that one of the things I frequently wish for in my life is a girl's Swiss Army knife. Delicatelly handled, in smooth wood or white pearl, yet totally functional, and with ALL the gadgets. Maybe monogrammed, or just with a nice simple insignia. My family crest, perhaps.
Energized by the night of electricity, we spent the day in the barn, digging under decades of old dirty things, left out there to rot.
We found an old fabric press that was like new ~ except old ~ in a turquoise metal cabinet on wheels and pulled it indoors to clean it and sell it. There is still an old roll of fabric inside it, once white, but yellowed now with age.
My favorite find was a beautiful old mahogany wood Radio-Phonograph cabinet, with black and gold weaved fabric over the speakers and some 78 records inside. I've never held a 78 before, they're much thicker and heavier than the vinyl I'm used to. "Matilda, Matilda" by Harry Belafonte is on one. Another is by Ford Britten and His Blue Comets called "Let's Leave it That Way". The label is Clarion, and the song is classified as a Foxtrot.
There is no date in the owner's manual, but it does detail how to install your new Beam-A-Scope antenna. It's beautiful, but it's dirty as shit.
*
We find a 50's Quisinart mixer, working great, with both blending arms in place and complete with two matching white bowls. I remember how my own mother had thrown her Quisinart away and just kept the bowls for her new hand-held model. This one was still covered in 30-year-old cake batter. You would pay $200 for that in a Vancouver oldies shop today, easy.
We find another box of 78 records, 45's too, and an old branding iron set. Bed frame after bed frame, wood and metal, and headboards of all description. A dozen, I bet. Chair after chair after chair. Several dozen. Irons after ironing boards. Lamps, lamps, lamps, lamp parts. She keeps every piece. Maps, like the pulldown ones the teachers used to have in school. She thinks those will be valuable. Some sort of cobbler's contraption with 4 iron insoles of descending size, for molding or stretching shoe leather. The smallest ones have a certain angle that goes through the arch, down the ball of the foot, and up the toe that reminds me of an elf or a leprechaun shoe.
Bureaus. Trunks. Everything works, almost nothing is really broken. Just dirty. Damned dirty. It's the dirtiest place I've even been in my life. Every single thing is dripping with the age of it, cobwebs, birdshit, insect egg nests. It's almost impossible to breath without choking. I breath shallow, so as not to insult her.
Planters. Gardening tools that are not of my lifetime. Kitchen tools, not of my lifetime. Long benches, short benches, everything handbuilt by some old guy who used to own this house but went bankrupt. He must have left everything behind.
Book shelves, display cabinets, door after door after unhinged door. We stack them for future rennovations. Books. I found a whole box of Mickey Spillane and Brett Halliday pulp fiction. Covers intact. She won't let me have them, but she'll never read them. They'll sit in a box and rot for another 20 years.
We throw nothing out, and nothing is really accomplished, but an empirical rearrangement of things.