Stormfront

“Stormfront” Taken by the author in Holbox, Mexico

  There is a storm moving across Southern Appalachia, the rain on the tin roof pattered and growled all night to remind me that I was alone. To sell dread. To wash, with corrosive constancy. I didn’t sleep well. I never do when she isn’t here, the rain didn’t help. She left for Charlotte yesterday with her parents. Driving to a hospital to seek a solution for the tumor that is growing in her father’s head. The family’s trepidation over the last few weeks now hobnobs with the recent barometer’s compression leaving me saturnine. Certainly, I wonder how she might be suffering. How her own neurological condition might be responding to the pressures…there is nothing I can do but watch the sheets of the torrent raze across the darkening vista and get myself to cover.

My phone ringtone plays Ben Fold’s “The Luckiest” when she calls. Her voice sounds cheerful and quiet. She’s keeping it together. She’s not in wrenching pain. I ask her if it has been raining there. It had not, but she thinks it might rain later. I wince a little knowing what that will bring for her. But I don’t say anything about that. We talk about daily constants: the shop, her boys, the noise people make when they sleep, our dogs…anything other than the pain.