Living on Writer's Block

I am sitting on a wood fence. It is simple, a standard two-pole, two wide-spaced-slat affair made of roughly hewn, generally rectangular-shaped odds and ends of wood. It has been recently edited; the inexperienced, pale tan and peachy slats show where the new bits are. The rest is weathered and grey, splinter-less and with varying shades of lichen dotting its underside. I am sitting on a grey slat, my shorts a little too short to protect me from a splintery new piece.

I am watching a storm. 

I didn’t know it was coming until about ten minutes ago, walking down the sidewalk towards home, when a distant flash of thin blue magic could be faintly seen through the willows behind the house. Those willows are now nearly black against the sky.

These are the colors I want to see in a high school girl’s color aesthetic. The pale, rosey-nectarine above the black willows, the pink-lavender behind them, and the faint, dull, earthy blue along the horizon, contrasted with the dark, nearly-black green of the willow. These words I write are not enough to convey the delicacy, the purity, the pale strength, the lightness of these colors, nor the terrifying nearness of the blackish green. 

Nothing man has made can equal the colors I see in this sky today. Our modern, man-made, synthesized colors and dyes and chemicals simply cannot equal the depth I see above me. We can dilute and approximate and creatively name Crayolas to our hearts’ content, but it will mean nothing when set beside the paint palette God has used. These colors have a depth, a meaning, a power that we cannot reach. Even our closest attempts would fail because they would lack the power before me. 

This fence is strong, holding both my brothers and me. They each have sticks. Aaron holds the smaller one, a chest-high snapped off pole he harvested from the efforts of the beaver dam below, sharp enough to stick in the ground if he can throw it hard enough. Daniel’s is longer, taller than even me, which is ironic given he is almost 9, two years younger than his brother, and still called “Tiny” even though he’ll be taller than the rest of us. The stick is about as big around as a quarter, maybe smaller, and will support his weight better than it will support mine.

My staff is long and thick, taller than me but shorter than Daniel’s stick, about as big around as Aaron’s wrist, and definitely supports my weight better than Daniel’s would. It sticks up between my knees and over my shoulder, propped on the ground underneath the place where my heels are hooked into the wire fencing above the bottom slat, keeping my knees high, almost parallel to the ground. My hands are down between my legs, wrists loosely crossed over the staff, my head resting lightly against the top of the stick, which is peeled to reveal a chocolatey-brown colored, smooth underskin. About a foot or so from the top, the grey bark starts to gain control of the stick, long thin streaks traveling down until the bark completely covers the rest of the staff. 

Sticks and I go way back. 

Even when I was first allowed to play out beyond the fence, I was constantly searching for the perfect, thin, stout, smooth branch to use as a cool staff to play adventurers with. 

About six, maybe seven years ago I found what I thought of as the perfect stick, peeled it, gave it some cool carvings (as well as I could, being 10) and took it along on a camping trip. On a hike, Dad got tired of me poking my brother with it (despite having been warned by both parental authorities many times) and took it away, flinging it into the bushes. I never saw it again.

About three years ago I found the second one. I had a special place for it, right in the corner between the porch railing and the wall of the house. Then over this past winter it disappeared; when I found it this past weekend, I broke it on accident. So I settled for the one I have now, which is actually the best of all of them, and I already want to do fun stuff to it — peal it, varnish it, seal it, carve it somewhere maybe, put a hole in the top with a strap through, and maybe even a carved-out handle with some leather straps wrapped around it. My ambitions will not last. This stick, too, like all the others, will become another broken old tree, flung on a scrap pile when someone messes around with it too much. But right now, it is my friend as I sit and watch the storms.

Another bright flash of lightning in the sky, a few more light droplets of water fall onto my bare shoulders. The lightning turns the sky bright blue, like a clear summer sky in mid-day, for one eighth of a second and then is gone again. The rain is light, not even a constant drizzle — it is here and gone again, two or maybe three drops before it peters out for another five minutes; but I can count the seconds between a flash and a rumble, and I have noticed that I have less time to wait between them now. The storm is getting closer, bringing fatter drops of rain. 

Another flash and then another rumble. This flash is long and large, and breaks a crack in the sky clear and discernible; this one does not hide in the clouds. My brothers, retreating into the house but still eager enough to watch that they have opened their window and are now commenting loudly on every flash and rumble, yell in awe. “This rumble will be big,” I think. A moment later I am proven right, as it tears through the air with crack that is sharp for the Palouse but dull for the Gettysburg battlefield. 

I was there, once, and leaving the visitors’ center just as the storm hit. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, but the word is wrong; it didn’t rumble — it split and broke and crashed and cracked, a sharper and clearer sound than I’d ever heard before. It was as if the cannon fire from 160 years ago was echoing over the landscape again, ghosts of the battle haunting those who came back to see it. The rain there was heavy and came down in sheets, the closest I’d ever seen to “buckets.”

The rain up here on the Palouse is generally one of two sides of a spectrum — either regular (maybe a little smaller), or huge fat drops the size of the tree frog we caught earlier this evening. Most storms are regular drops, but heavy and down-pouring; or else they’re huge, fat, heavy, splashing and hitting like hail.

They come all at once now, big, round, and splashy. And I love it. They splat in my hair, on my shoulders, behind my glasses in my eyes, on my back, giving me the warmest and simultaneously most cooling shower a body can get. 

The sky is now a sort of navy-blue plummy color, not quite the classic midnight but not really the violet type of nighttime color either. The wind is picking up now that the storm has reached us. The sliding glass door opens behind me and Dad suggests I may want to come inside now. I sigh and prop my stick against the fencepost, pick up my Birkenstocks from the fence beside me and accidentally sweep my phone backwards into the yard, then ease around on the fence until I am facing the house. I shove away from it, clear Mom’s tulips and the bark that covers them to land in the grass. I scoop up my phone and head inside.