A Blessing and a Curse

My psyche is hardwired to the weather.  It effects my moods more than anyone I know.  I have been fortunate to live in an endless chain of wild blue skies, so much so that I can remember each of the gray ones.  Or so it seems.

I remember the first time I heard an airplane.  I lived in the country next to my great grandfather's farm in Ohio in another century.  My memory of this day is very movie-like.  I spent weekdays with my grandmother as both my parents worked in the city.  I was young, younger than preschool, but I remember many of those days.  They come back to me at times in episodes and vignettes, but they add up.  This particular day (I must have been four), I was standing in the long front yard beside the gravel driveway that sloped seemingly forever down to the road.  I had never ventured more than a few yards from the house, but this day I had become adventurous and had gone further on my own than I had ever been before.  It was an eerie feeling, I remember, standing in the middle of all that green grass of summer with the high blue skies stretching out above me forever.  I felt caught in the middle of everything, between the house and the road, between earth and sky.  I had become, I felt, untethered.

The feeling of standing there, arms akimbo, still, just sensing what that was like is acute even now--perhaps more so.  And as I stood transfixed in the attitude of a supplicant like some fresh-hatched,  Thoreau, I heard music coming from a distant place in some deep, far-off corner of heaven, a music I'd never heard before and which I could not comprehend.  Slowly it approached, closer and louder, a song in a single chord with harmonies that wavered up and down.  "Howummmmm," it went, modulating, advancing and retreating as it approached.  "Howemmmmm," it went until it overtook me.

When my grandmother came out and called me back to the house, I went as an explorer and a seer, an educator trying to articulate the experience with abandonment, running and pointing and shouting.  I wanted her to hear it.  I wanted her to see it, too.

That was the day, I think, that led to the rest of those blue sky days.  It was so unlike Ohio, so unlike the damp, gray days that mars life with arthritis and sinus infections.  Elsewhere.  I remember it like a promise.

It made me different, I know, from those who never wandered away and saw those skies and heard that music.  I continued to wander away, I suspect, in order to hear that music and see those skies again, away from crowds and mundane, human conversations.  I've wandered into those days again, a thousand times, a million.  It has been the one thing, sometimes the only thing, in my life.

Sitting here on a gray morning alone, I see it now for what it was, a blessing and a curse.