Of wind and sea

Thursday, 25 September 2008

We have got another northeaster again, a bit fiercer than the one last week when Jessy and I rode up to Chincoteague to see it. This one is less picturesque and less welcome, and we certainly don't need to go anywhere else but home to see it. From my window I watch with no sense of comfort as the whole Bay breaks up into wild whitecaps, rising three and four feet in places and smacking into our pretty concrete jetty so that not merely the spray but the wave's own green water shoots straight up and rains down on the terrace. If not for our own garden wall we might well be seeing waves lapping at our swimming pool.

(Do not even ask about the pool! --it is by now thoroughly salty!)

As I write this the sky has gone dark in two hours' anticipation of sunset and the wind hammers at the side of the house. Fortunately our lovely boat is not here but already pulled out for the season and safely blocked somewhere well up the Delaware River, or else I might have seen it bobbing too animatedly too close to the floating dock. Our chaises and tables are all pushed up against the house where they would have blown much less neatly had we left them out.

I am not cold and sit here, still in my jeans and jersey from school and with my warm little bear in my lap, shivering even so as I consider how very vulnerable a human being is before Nature. My only consolation is that all things come from God, including these storms, and maybe this is His way of testing us, of showing us what we must endure in order to learn to trust Him in His infinite judgement. Then again maybe this is His way of changing the seasons. If so, then not as I will, but as You will, O God... and forgive me for lamenting that my summer here has been much too short!

...