Finding a small window of settled weather this morning, I ventured forth on a brisk uphill walk through my usual haunts. Actually, my ambulation did not become brisk until the roadway leveled off, permitting my huffs and puffs to regulate. The sky was piled high with mountains of vanilla-cream clouds, spilling luxuriantly one over the other so that there was no discernible beginning nor end of their cumulative mass. Light and shadow, in particularly sharp definition (given the sun's ins and outs), highlighted the contours of the towering meringue peaks.
I found a neighborhood home empty and for sale. A foreclosure. Wandering cautiously onto the property, I was lured to a spacious deck giving onto the most stunning view of a golf course studded with both evergreen and colorful deciduous trees. Tenderly embracing the expansive green were rolling hills whose dusty timber had been washed clean by the previous evening's downpour. What arrested my gaze, however, was the brilliant light from an otherwise watery sun that flooded Miner's Point in pearly opalescence.
A genuine showstopper.
This late afternoon would be a perfect time to remain indoors and curl up in front of the fireplace with a good read. Possessing many a good book but no obvious fireplace, I have to bolt. Cabin fever has gotten the better of me, so I'm going to put on a brave face and raincoat and dash headlong into the blustery and darkening remains of one hour's daylight.
Drawn along the same path, I surge forward, my frame a near-horizontal incline against the punishing gale. Upon entering the same property as the day before, I find shelter under the eaves of the house. They afford little more than minor relief from the rain but virtually none from the wildly circulating winds. I don't mind. I knew what lay ahead the moment I stepped out my own front door.
Once again my attention is fixed on a Miner's Point now enveloped in a wild and woolly atmospheric condition so different from that of the day before. Undulating foothills and their swaying sentinels roil in a sea of cascading and sprinting vapors. A barely discernible mountain pass is in evidence only because a string of diamond-like automobile headlights and blurred red taillights are flowing downward and upward respectively on a distant roadway cradled within sloping walls of earth, stone and tree.
I've never before been this soaked to the bone and loved it so ...
Like a moth to the flame, a poet to the babbling brook, a drunkard to the grog, I expect to be pulled in once again. Whether by simple desire or actual gravity, who can say? Perhaps the draw to this property has proven merely a flicker of subconscious recognition of similarities to my childhood home.
My third visit to the bank-owned home with the killer view shall be tomorrow ...
Calm is as good as any a word to describe the new day and its weather as I saunter along from my current digs to that greatly missed, fabled "childhood" home on the hill. Though the look of the sky is an autumnal cool and gray overcast, yet Sol gently, unobtrusively illumines the dirty cotton batting, thereby spreading an expansive cheer and warmth throughout the vale.
Perched once again on the deck and looking outward with the eyes of a thirteen-year old boy, I am transported back a half century. Having come from the fertile valleys of central California and landing on the highest peak in a little, unincorporated hamlet, I feel that all the air has been squeezed from my lungs. It could've been literally, but, of course, you must realize that I'm speaking figuratively.
My family and I were standing on the deck of a home for sale. The old darling was beautifully hewn of stone and rough timber. She was a mere shell - an interior yet to be fitted out - but with such potential. My mother, enamored of the entire package, commented to the owner that only one thing was missing: a view of the ocean. The lady of the house smiled and directed my mother's gaze over to the left. Pointing to a break in the trees on the distant range, Mrs. Emerson said, "Look, Dear." There, faintly but absolutely, was a sliver of blue crowned by whitecaps.
My "new home," too, affords a Pacific glimmer, one that beckons this grown-up "thirteen-year old" to cast off and dream on toward the morrow ...
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