Well, New Hampshire has struggled with all sorts of weather this summer, from tornadoes to torrential rains. Thunder and lightning almost seem a part of the daily weather pattern. Correspondent Sherwin Sleeves has been thinking about the unusually stormy season and files this report:
SFX: Ambient sounds, birds, chirping…
The sun is out now, but the light is torn. There’s a rag-tag of ruffian clouds massing over the mountains and the blue spots of sky above are dissolving fast. I am not at all convinced the sun has any intention of staying through the day. No need to consult the forecasters. There is more rain on the way. More thunder, more lightning. And then the whole motley drenching will loop again, why not? On the other hand, the sun is getting a well-earned rest. Closing its superhot eye and just coasting along. Free as a bird behind the cloud vault. A hand of gin rummy with the moon, perhaps. Whatever the sun does when we don’t need it.
SFX—rain
The great E.B. White once described a head cold in a useful and apt way: “When you can’t breathe through your nose,” he wrote, “Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”
That’s exactly the feeling of these endless scattered storms. It is as though the whole state of New Hampshire has a head cold. We can’t breathe through our noses and tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.
Under washaway skies, during the reprieve, I hasten out to the dripping, wild garden woods. The ground is nest-like and tender and softly stubbled with every kind of mushroom. Like bright orange plates, like closed umbrellas, like swollen brown leaves, the citizen mushrooms. One doesn’t have to be a botanist to guess that they thrive in the circumstance of the torrential, in the punch of the raindrop. And despite the fact that they’ve just been born, yesterday or the day before, they look a million years old. Not a single youngster in the lot. Just an ever-enlarging council of elders. Is there anything so freshly born that looks as instantly ancient as a mushroom? It’s here in the out-of-time quality of the toadstool that E.B. White’s head cold confusion gets reflected again.
MUSIC – Sufjan Stevens “Redford”
The rain brings mushrooms, and a mushroom-like mood. And while it lasts perhaps tomorrow will continue to seem strangely like the day before yesterday. But when the thunder quiets and the lightning dims and the rains finally clear, we will once again breathe through our noses and today - whenever it comes - will feel beautifully, intensely, like today.
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Just loved hearing this today on the radio so listened again this evening at my computer. I sent it on to family, but they may not 'get it' since they haven't experienced the NH Summer of 2008!
My thanks to Sherwin Sleeves for a charming view it!
I believe this is the third seasonal reflection I've heard from Sherwin Sleeves. With each one he seems to take an entire season and compresses it into a few striking images and sounds that ring so true, you think "that's exactly it, that's what summer (or fall or spring) is." I look forward to what is becoming a new seasonal tradition: watching the weather outside my window start to change and looking on NHPR.org for Mr. Sleeves to bid farewell to the waning season and usher in the new.