By Mary Oliver
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
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It was a quiet Monday around here apart from accidentally flooding the laundry room because I didn't realize the filter over the drainpipe from the washing machine to the sink had gotten jammed from having to wash the rug from the bathroom with the litterboxes. So the laundry is done but not folded, the floor is mopped but has no rug, and Effie, who hides down there when there are storms, is angry that someone else was poking around her space while there was thunder.
Otherwise, we spent the day following news of the hurricane creeping up the coast, with breaks for watching baseball and Antiques Roadshow, plus burgers for dinner. Brookside Gardens had to cancel its annual Wings of Fancy butterfly show, but whether because July was so hot or the pollution is so low with fewer people around, this has been a spectacular summer for butterflies, swallowtails in particular, so here are some of the ones we saw outdoors at Brookside on Saturday:
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