In Praise of Falling

Meteorology

Meteorology The year I got divorced, El Niño slammed the California coast and for a while everything changed—salmon boats hauled tropical fish out of San Francisco Bay, a partridge native to North Dakota pecked around my front stoop, escapee from a Chinatown butcher shop, or benefactor of some misguided wind. North of here, a small town slid into Russian River, A-frame cabins, redwood decks and all, while fundamentalists preached Armageddon, and I learned to cook single portions, to say I instead of we. Mornings, a waterfall poured from my neighbor’s roof past my bedroom window, and I woke up feeling like a woman who had let her disaster insurance lapse just before the storm, or that person you see on the news, slogging through her basement in borrowed hip waders, showing the camera a soggy cardboard box, crying, Twenty years of photographs ...it’s a shame. Over coffee  Dumesnil PGS:Layout 1 4/28/09 12:32 PM Page 61 a friend told me, I am so glad I got married then divorced, and I wondered if I would ever feel the same. Most nights I worked late, listening to traffic reports, waiting for a break in the weather, while students huddled under umbrellas shuffled past my office door to the library, the cafeteria, the party or dorm. Driving home one night, I watched a Nissan throw arabesques and pirouettes around four lanes of traffic, then land on the graveled shoulder in textbook parallel parking fashion, totally unscathed. Two miles later a sedan glided so gracefully off the freeway, I wondered if I had really seen it at all—two red lights arcing down the ice plant embankment, the sound of its impact absorbed by rain. I drove home ditching potholes and fallen limbs, expecting anything to happen next—a stranger’s face appearing in the darkened window, a woman descending from the clouds, whispering my name.  Dumesnil PGS:Layout 1 4/28/09 12:32 PM Page 62 ...