Wednesday

I just saw an odd skirt walk by, with its wearer and two little dogs.  It is raining and the wind is blowing, so the skirt was doing some whipping around, and took several seconds of good hard staring before I was sure what I was looking at.  It was a full-length skirt, and not very wide, so it was very likely to need a slit up the back, for the ease of the walker within.  That or very stretchy material.  But this one had a fairly wide but not very tall rectangle cut out of the material, at the back.  Shades of Hayley Mills and The Parent Trap!  But it looked to be working just fine, although odd-looking, as I mentioned.

I'm at the library, with music playing in my headphones.  Thijs van Leer. It is barely raining at the moment, but it is that familiar sort of Portland rain, in which there is much more light than one would expect.  As though the overcast layer of clouds, instead of blocking the sunlight from reaching us, is instead magnifying it as it diffuses it, so very white light, without any surface brightness, if that makes sense -- nothing to make you squint.  And then there are all the tiny raindrops fastened to everything, which are reflecting and increasing the magnitude of the light.  I'm sure a meteorologist would know the one word definition of this state, and I do not, because I'm not a meteorologist, Jim -- I'm just a pluviophile who has lived here all her life. 
 

Next stop on this train of thought: last night I was driving home in the rainy dark with no windshield wipers (long story) and I was having to be much more invested in the moment-to-moment act of driving -- aware of every shift in the pools of fragmented light from headlights and streetlights and neon signs, because each one, as it passed over my windshield, gave me a moment of reflection through which I could not really see.  At first this kept panicking me, and I was bobbing around in my seat, trying to find some angle through which I could see, but not being able to see, and feeling like slamming on the brakes, and then the reflection would pass on over my head and I could see again.  Until the next time. 

But soon I realized that I just needed to take note, each time this happened, of the street in front of me, so I could be aware of what I was going to be passing over in that split-second of non-seeing, and the panic died away.  Until I found that I was singing loudly along with the radio as I drove.  So I had passed through difficulty, panic, problem-solving, and gotten all the way to acceptance, to the point where I was performing the new method of driving so easily that I could spare enough of my brain to belt out, "Diamonds on the Soles of My Shoes," with all the fancy bits.  The human brain is an amazing thing.  And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, since I re-watched Lucy twice this past weekend.

Okay!  So that is what I am thinking about just now.  Aren't you glad you asked?