Off the Cliff

Last night was 1958. Some day I'll make a list of what the ethos of 1958 involves, except it's a slippery sideways concept with no memories to back up the impressions. (It's not so much that I have holes in my memories of childhood, as that my memories are a charred document that didn't completely burn through. Phrases and sentences survive, and sometimes whole pages; but mostly it's tantalizing fragments, like the poems of Sappho. Nothing even resembling a continuous narrative; I remember my school rooms but not my teachers, until I got to be a pre-pubescent 11 in a different place.) All that matters, really, is that 1958 means safe and happy, largely because 1958 is a cold brown fall seen from warm indoors. The brownish overcast sky last night was fall, and the cool wind, and so was the beginning of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell which I'm rereading-- though the massy grey-green trees out the study window were Fukushima of summer 1991 by way of Lesley Downer.

Alas that this calm and calming autumnal scene yielded to the promised severe thunderstorms which, as ever, recurred all night. So I got up in mug and went to the doctor and then, hacking and sneezing, back down to do my shift. And when I came out the winds had blown dry coolness in and the world was deep green and blues laughing in the sun. And to confirm it I biked up to Loblaws from the east, not the west, and through the parking lot, and that made it 2007. Truly, have there been no aoarashi days in eight years? There were some the next year, splendid afternoons between the downpours. But I remember no others since then.