They will have to go to the adoption center, all too soon.
April here is rushing on as if it were March, it was wet, cool, rainy yesterday. It was a day of lowering clouds, and grape hyacinths in the grass. The flagstones outside the door were a dark slate color, and the grass now is serenely green, flaming, in it's own way. Zinnia from last year are popping up in their bed. I will spread them this year, to other parts of the garden. I have always felt that one cannot have too much lavender, or too many zinnia. They grow twice as much when cut, and in such a rainbow profusion, that it is impossible to go wrong with them.
The tomatoes should have long been in the ground, but I am tardy this year, with this glorious weather, that reminds me so much of Scotland. My brother, Marc, and I did visit Scotland at the end of March, beginning of April, for our birthdays. Which is a lovely time of year, bearing in mind that we were traveling towards The Orkneys, a spot above Oslo, Norway in longitude. We damn near died of exposure, but it was invigorating.
We felt the strong pull of our deep, ancestral roots, while discovering why all the Scottish we met, wanted to move to Florida. I have never, until this year, felt so much wind. If there is anything eternal in Scotland at all, it is the wind. Known to lift small children, and deposit them in Africa, the wind followed us from one wet, rain-whipped tower to the next. Watching the fishing boats putter about in the harbor at one island, and pelted by freezing rain, and sleet, showed us why the prime vacation time in Scotland was August.
The wind was so strong at John O'Groats, that the van we arrived in, was in danger of being overturned by it. The local ferry refused to run, because of the storm coming up on the North Sea. But the Norwegian line (and surely they had experience?) was running, come wind, rain, shine, or sleet. And run the passage we did.
At one point in our journey from John O'Groats to Kirkwall, the boat actually stood up on one side, pulling the stabilizers out of the water. This resulted in a noise as if Satan himself were riding on that side, and very upset about it, too.
The passengers had all been called down to the bowels of the vessel, to try to stabilize it. There wasn't any question of surviving if we capsized. The water temperature of the North Sea is colder than the dark side of the moon. I was having a conversation with the bartender, who refused to give me another Americano, a dark, rich coffee concoction that I can get down at Mill Mtn. Coffee and Tea. It's water added to espresso, I believe. Anyway, I was wondering where all the other passengers had gone, and asking for some more coffee from this man behind the counter. To this day, I don't remember his name, but our conversation is one I will think of for many years.
My brother had disappeared, simply saying, "Stay here." If they had been going to the lifeboats, I would be dead now, watching over the luggage with his camera collection. To be honest, he did check and make sure they weren't evacuating us: it would have been pointless. If that boat couldn't make it in that storm, little ones certainly weren't going to.
Anyway, this is how dissociation works: all of a sudden, I am standing alone in a large, comfortable, ultra-modern cabin, where moments ago, all had been a bustle around me. And then someone mentioned that the ship was going down. There was a scramble, as if people were trying to board the subway at rush hour, and then I and this fellow were alone, staring at each other from across the bar.
We did some shouting at one another, simply for clarification...I wasn't going to get anymore coffee at that moment, and I didn't want a whiskey. The boat was making some tremendous straining-engine noises. I really 'came to' when the jewelry in the display cases down the hall, catapulted through the windows, still attached to the neck models they were draped on. Some newer, pinball games, chained to the wall, fell over, with a large, heavy crash.
Events stopped rushing, and my hair started crawling around on my head. There was dead silence after the crashing, except for the faint, distant screech of metal on metal. I found out later, it was the cars in the hold scraping against each other. The bartender and I simply stared at each other. The idea finally came into my mind, that this might be the last human face I saw. I know that the thought had occurred to him earlier, much earlier, but I had missed his reaction, dissociating as I was.
Then, the bow lifted clean out of the water, and I was clinging to the rail in front of me. My body was almost perpendicular to the floor, but I managed to wonder how all those bottles of booze stayed upright. If I hadn't known I was an alcoholic from way back, that was my clue.
I finally located the other passengers from the screams coming down the hallway. They were at the center of the ship, acting as ballast. I decided that if I were going to die, I wanted to be in my brother's company, but letting go of the rail was impossible, at the moment. I would have joined the group like dropping in on them from a building.
And then the boat righted, and slipped behind an island, and everywhere was a deep, satisfying silence.
That was the beginning of our tour of Scotland. I had promised my brother adventure, and I had delivered. From that point on, big Sister rocked.
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