Rain

The day started off cool and heavy with rain, and by the time I got to work it had begun.  A good, proper rainy day - and we had thunder and deluge off and on too.  By one o'clock, there was a bit of sunshine, and when I left the office at four to go exchange the rental car (and ended up being able to pick up my own **), it was plenty overcast, but not actively raining.

Tonight, though, it is a thick sky.  All the way down to the ground.

It's hot out, for one.  Probably sixty-five at least.  And the rain, so copious has nowhere left to go.  The ground is saturated; a pudding, a morass.  It can't take in any more.  And so the air is left to hold the bag - and it is misty, heavy, almost impossible to see through - almost impossible to walk through.

Breathing it is almost as bad as not breathing.  Suffocating.  It is nasty.

Still, the Lolly needs her walkies - so the air must be braved.  And I need my walkies too, really.  In over a week and a half without enough exercise, the challenges to breathing don't get thinner with poor habits.  I've even put back on three or four pounds, which is frustrating but more a motivator than really dismaying.  Easy enough to rectify.

As to the reason for the decline in exercise, of course my back is finally getting better.  Sadly, still I'm not at my best.  I did notice starting around Sunday evening that the little pains I was noticing were the muscle soreness of new exercise or unaccustomed use - I was feeling, not the pain of my back, but the sore moments of those parts of me which have been compensating for that pain over time.  A good exchange, that.  And encouraging, after cleaning house on Saturday, which wasn't easy (and, since I am a *stupid* and stubborn brat, happened to involve a lot of laundry-lugging).

Less encouraging was my mom's diagnosis with a chronic, incurable disease - and her more immediate, acute issues with a very temporary but still far too impressive illness.  By yesterday, she was sounding subdued, passive, very quiet.  In short, noting like herself.  That was  little sobering, and though she seems to be on the upswing herself from the more immediate illness, the other one is probably going to come into daunting, depressing focus.  It's especially dismaying, because mom has been working so hard for a while now to work out, to lose weight, to eat right.  So to get a bad report makes that seem like wasted effort, and it has been a lot of effort.

Add to this that my stepfather too is not so well these days, and the impotence I feel regarding my loved ones is a bit much.

It's odd, though - this rarefied Leap Day, this heavy weather, this irksome business with my own fallout since the collision - these things with my family, and how hectic work has been - I have been feeling particularly sanguine today.  Not joyous.  But grateful.  Content.  At peace.  Quietude, even if it is not satisfaction, is much to sink into, to enjoy.

So it goes.  And another day almost over ...



**The only problem with picking up my own car was the ding they left on the passenger side - which I was prepared to overlook - and the extreme amount of CREAKING in the read - which I was not.  Even during the couple of days I drove it after the accident, before it could be dropped off, it wasn't sounding like that.  So this is disconcerting.  And disappointing - given that I thought getting to pick it up was finally the end of being stuck in rental cars.  Blah.