Stormy Weather

What can I say, I'm a cool weather loving guy. When there is a tempest, I'm happiest. And that's the problem. We had a nice little rain storm here a week ago and then--wham, it got hot again. It depresses me for some reason. Just like the girls lay better in cool weather, I write better.

Here's my dream for a better day. A trailer in Northern California in the redwoods. Oh, would I love that, course there would be a small garden and hen house. Some place I could ride my bike to for shopping and visits. Somewhere near the Russian River would be ideal.

When I go to the Russian River Valley, I feel like I'm at home. That restless feeling inside me is soothed. I can write with ease there, even when the temperatures get high in that area, I can still find myself at ease writing.

If I just had the guts to find a place, sell everything and move there, but I can't seem to find it in me. I'm living in the same house I was when ten. Not that I didn't move outta here, I just moved back in later. And that was something I thought would never happened. I thought I would never see this place again, yet here I am waking to it each morning.

That took some doing at first. Waking up here in this house after living in Topanga. It was a very happy time then in Topanga. My lover John at the time was a great guy and our home there was perched on a cliff, three stories tall. Well, perched would be considered more of a teeter, the house was from 1929. Built as a summer home for some family, it was made of cedar with the cedar planks being the same plank on the outside as inside. In the morning you could see your breath while in bed. It had a wood stove to keep warm and a fire place.

We were young then, Johnny and me. Young and lucky in many ways, in that we stayed together for over twenty years until we were forced to move by fate. In the same year that my mother died, so did the landlord for our place in Topanga. It forced us to move, but the move took me back to my parent's house to care for my father who was handicap. Johnny hated it here. He missed the canyon and so did I. There were terrifying days when I would wake up scared shitless because I was in a strange room. I had been dreaming of daily life in Topanga and when I woke it was in this strange room in a strange place. Johnny and I lost our privacy too, my dad slept in the room next to ours and made John very uncomfortable about having sex. Our relationship began to tear until one day, he said he was leaving.

It wasn't hard to say goodbye, The signs were there that he was unhappy and me denying that we were unhappy, just not use to the new place and I don't think we would have ever gotten use to it here after having our own life together in Topanga. We sort of grew up in the canyon, both of us moving there in our twenties. We stayed close until John's death from cirrhosis of the liver. He drank pretty hard and after we broke up, even harder than before. I miss him terribly to this day. You would think after all these years(he died in 95) that I would be over it but I'm not. The pain is still fresh, I still cry when thinking of him.

I'm hoping though that my spirits will pick up. It's tough right now, Wally has dementia, even when he tries to carry a conversation it is very difficult for him. Our joy is laying next to each other in silence, holding on. I think we hold each other while in bed because if we didn't, one of us would slip away.

That's how warm weather makes me feel, as if I'm slipping into a void where I become nothing. As if the molecules that make up my body are spinning so fast that I will fragment into billions of pieces.

Here's to cooler weather and the slowing of atoms that cold causes. Here's to tall redwoods, deep forests, and trailers.