I saved up my last round of errands for today, and naturally Tropical Storm Alberto picked it to sweep across North Carolina.
It is raining. It is raining like death and sorrow and the end of the world. All the usual metaphors involving hammers and buckets and cats and dogs fall down in the face of this rain. This is rain that drowns conventional metaphors.
It’s raining like a Nick Cave song.
The people at the packaging store I use are wonderful. Not only do they go the extra mile packing up my art–the owner built me a crate to ship a large canvas in last week–but they’re just nice people. He ran out to the car carrying an umbrella so that I wouldn’t get soaked on the way to the store, and having learned that I had other errands yet to run, found another umbrella in the back of the store to take with me. (I own several umbrellas. Some day, I will find the box they’re in.)
So I got change and beef jerky and a coupla used books, the standard equipment for a trip, and slogged home. Now I just have to fill out control sheets for art, and pop the last few things into boxes.
The state is awash in flash flood warnings, which I’m generally not worried about–we’re on a bit of a hill up from the lake and if we find ourselves treading water, the city of Raleigh will be a total loss. Thunderstorm warnings abound, but at the moment, it just looks like rain, rain, rain.
