Weather Patterns

In South Bend again, sitting at a table I bought at the beginning of my senior year of college at a Salvation Army just off-campus that is now boarded up, likely sold to developers to become a high-end condo community with a vaguely Irish name.

Living technically alone, for the first time in a decade. How afraid I was of being alone then! Now I’m sitting here at 5:30am writing by candlelight surrounded by shells and art and memories I’ve collected. A caricature of myself!

Thunder and lightning the other night, heavy rain and I was lying on the floor of my room. My room, only. Heard the crack of thunder and remembered taking Buddy down to the basement at William St., during a summer storm when it was hot, hot, hot out and the A/C wasn’t on and with the windows open, the noise of the storm cracked in and he was scared. But it was too hot then, and humid, upstairs to shut the windows and turn on the air. So I took him to the basement where it was cool and sat with him on the stairs.

Both of us knots of frantic, unsettled energy, nervous from the various storms passing through that felt they might never end. I didn’t have a plan. Sleep in the basement? I didn’t know. I’m sure I was trying to remove us, and the scared noises we made, from my ex-husband’s delicate purview. I think he was still in the same bedroom then.

In those summer months and, upon further review, in the preceding years, I had to do the next best thing every minute, every day, to try to keep the dark from closing in, until it did and I cracked like thunder. What was a never is a possibility and then a reality, and the wheel keeps turning like that.

Siena, April 2022

My Buddy boy, my heart aches with missing you. And all that you held for me and with me. Our walks around Geneva; how you knew the word ‘car’ and ‘park'. When we’d run down the paths in that wooded ravine by the creek, near the light blue house with the stained glass transom windows in the living room and the good fenced yard, that we didn’t buy but where we first met the realtor who would later help us both buy and then sell ‘our’ house in a span of 18 months.

Even then, Buddy boy, we always looked for wonder, even then, when we’d run through that ravine and find animal tracks and forest plants and growth, evidence of all the life to explore. My angel.