Water, Water Everywhere

We have been having a spectacular amount of rain here in northeastern New Jersey, which has flushed away most of the spectacular snow. It seems odd to look out at the front yard and not see WHITEWHITEWHITE and I can turn into the driveway without veering around the corner glacier. Some rivers are still rising and there are many people who have been flooded out of their homes altogether.

Last Monday morning, Ken went downstairs to fetch the newspaper from the driveway (we have yet to give up the paper habit. Ken loves his sports pages) and I heard him say, “Uh, oh…” which is never a good thing to hear, much less on a Monday morning when any interruption to routine can blow up the rest of the day. He followed it up with: “We have some water down here.” So down I went to pull out my private stash of old towels with no paint on them for purposes like this.

What is annoying about this is there are three GIANT cat litter boxes downstairs, which means the cats must have noticed that to attend to their secret habits, they would have had to put their dainty feet into half an inch of cold rainwater. With their advanced talents for waking us up on weekend mornings to be fed, which include hair pulling, ear lobe nipping, staring into my closed eyes while purring loudly, pushing my books off the nightstand onto the floor, stealing my socks and getting into screaming matches with each other, you would think they would have had the courtesy of given us notice: “Hey, youze guys! There’s wahta in the basement; we don’t want to get out feeties wet going to the loo! Fix it!”

But nooooo. They shucked their innate feline modesty and took their morning dump in the one box we have upstairs reserved for 18 year-old cat, Simba, whose arthritis makes it hard for him to negotiate the stairs. (It’s odd how he is pretty much the only one to use it).  Fortunately, for them, we got it all cleaned up before we went to work, just in time for them to go to sleep on the couch, exhausted from our labors.

The Universe, Unfolding

 

I have been working out regularly for a couple of months now and have gotten to the point of enjoying the movement after sitting behind a desk for hours.  My aerobic contraption of choice is the elliptical machine, both for the calorie expenditure (I can subtract the chicken sandwich I had for lunch) and for the “floaty feeling” of running through space, especially when the Ipod is spun to a tune with a strong beat and I can let go of the handlebars and swing my arms. It’s almost fun.

When possible, I pick the same machine every time, one of three facing the window on the second floor of the gym. While exercising, I can entertain myself by watching cars pull into and out of the parking lot below while men, women and children in various exercise attire enter and leave the building. But what I really like about spinning away up there on my perch is the enormous vault of sky. With a little imagination, I find myself running and flying through the clouds, leaping over the tops of pine trees and skimming the hemlocks bordering the road.

The other day, a pair of Mourning doves arrowed past the window as a flock of starlings sank into a grove of trees. In the distance, the shallow “V” of a Turkey Vulture tilted over the highway to the east, and circling closer to my building and high, so high! were three Red-tailed Hawks. I see these raptors often in town, on my way to and from the gym and work, either roosting in a tall white pine on the next block or scouting the neighborhood for dinner. I even found where one of them cached a frozen squirrel corpse on the top of a telephone pole.

 But as I spun away on the elliptical machine to the beat of the drums in my ears, two of the spiraling hawks separated from the third and then orbited each other, swimming through the sky, gradually closing the diameter separating them.  They coiled closer, then closer as I leaned forward in the machine, my legs spinning faster, and I wondered if…if….

Suddenly, the hawks closed their wings and clasped talons. They swirled through the air as if they were one great bird plummeting languorously toward earth.  Within seconds, they sprang apart, arcing away and into the sun. I was racing now on the machine, flying as fast as I could. As the birds soared and defied gravity in the crazy act of recreating themselves, I was there too, my spirit swirling around and within them as I witnessed the Universe still unfolding, as it should.

Then, it was over. The hawks drifted off. I returned to my body to find it still spinning in its circle in the machine, my arms no longer straight down at my sides but stretched wide, like wings.