Steady Spring Rain

My first three days in London, the sun shone, bright, bizarre, some soothing and welcome and foreign benevolent omen of spring. We wore dark sunglasses to protect our eyes from the glare and, despite the cold air, could sense the tingling warmth of the long waves on our skin. Anticipating nothing but gray skies, a stretched taut quilt of gray, anticipating splashes of rain and puddles, and, in a bout of surprising and unexpected preparedness while packing, I stowed away my bright red umbrella, wore my long camel trench, the ideal jacket for early spring travel through Europe. While the jacket mostly shielded the cold, the impermeable fabric lay to waste those first few days, the umbrella idle. London laughed in the sun, mouth agape to catch the golden rays.

Home now, the sky turns from one shade of gray to darker to black, as the sphere revolves and rotates, day to night. The temperature a bit tempestuous, March seeking to rival April in her cruelty and her wicked tricks, layering has been critical: soft sweaters over long cotton tunics, with crisp chino pants. Inspired by this bit of prep classicalism, today, in spite of the wet, a perpetual potential for disaster and destruction with nice clothes, I wore some red bow flats, simple and somehow a bit too darling for the office. 

I have been sitting and working in our large conference room for the past ten hours, reading and editing, neurons numb with the tedium of the content, and already so much of the memory of London, just a few days passed, has melted, like some of gossamer of cotton candy abandoned carelessly in the rain; as a child, these lessons come hard. Transience and mortality, even of the material, seems impossible. That these things should apply to memories, or to whole stages of life, to entire swaths of time, is even less immediately plausible and understood.

(image taken from EHB)