"The Office" (Workstation series) 20 (Tropical depression edition)

Saturday morning crowd at the Office (different group, on a very different biorhythm). Dharmonia is out of town but the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin have arrived. Though this is more the remnants of monsoon than the kind of storm I grew up with, it's the kind of day my mother (whose NY publisher family summered Down East) described as "State of Maine weather." I don't know the origin of the term but I can vouch for its descriptive accuracy. This kind of weather--misty, cool, not too much wind, light blowing rain--is the kind of weather you get on the coast of Maine in late spring (basically, June) and early fall (basically, late August). It's great fishing weather--I remember a lot of days out on the lobster beds with weather like this--and it's great curl up in a bookstore or a library in a big chair weather. Days like this in my home town when I was a child were days when my mom would drop me and my younger siblings off at the local library and leave us there, happy, for 2 or 3 hours (you could still do that in the '60s without either terror or lawsuits). That library was the only place in my home town I felt safe, and when, years later, I visited after its renovation only to find the interior utterly changed, even re-engineered and configured, it was one of the most shocking, disorienting experiences of my life. That's when I knew my home was gone (childhood house long since sold by then) and my childhood was too.

Rainy days are good days for learning to accept loss.



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Now playing: Gordon Bok - The Stable Lad