Heavy Weather

I was right about the weather. For such prescience, I should be carried about on a litter and annointed a shaman. Rattles should be shaken in my general direction.

It's rained for two days and grown much colder. This morning we are dusted with snow and a major storm is sliding up from Missouri. When the front finally clears, a blast of cold air from Canada and the lake-effect snow begins. We'll have the eighteen inches in the wood lot by Monday morning.

I am too busy working to do what needs to be done.

To start the day, a few lines from "The Times Atlas" by another Michigan boy, Jim Harrison. The poem appears in The Theory & Practice of Rivers (Winn Books, 1986), in the 1989 Clark City Press edition of that book, and in Harrison's The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998):

Meanwhile the weather is no longer amusing.
Earth frightens me, the blizzard, house's
shudder, oceanic roar, the brittle night
that might leave so many dead.