Woot. Look at me! I'm keeping a promise!

Wow, it's like New Year's in August with this resolution and all. I suppose that's fitting, since there's Christmas in July - which, if you live in my house, comes complete with christmas music courtesy of Pokechop the iPod.

H'anyway, I know I promised blogs with pictures, and I know you're all terribly disappointed that this blog will not be discussing anything that I promised to discuss from the previous post, but it's my blog, dammit, and I'm going to wax poetic for a while, because my husband doesn't want to hear it.

Lucky you.

It doesn't feel it, but it's fall here. The temperature is still balmy, still humid, still oppressive. The leaves are slowly yellowing and dropping into the impatiens in the back yard. Driving with Cecilia today, a birch tree has lost the majority of it's leaves. Those are always my favorite kind to step on, they have good "crunch."

I'm sure the hurricane spinning off the coast is helping the leaves to drop, even if they aren't quite ready. It hasn't made landfall yet, but already, even 300 miles north, the winds are kicking up that moist air, and the sky is ominous. I love it. I love hurricanes. Ernesto is making me terribly homesick.

Growing up when a hurricane would hit the coast, we'd pile into the truck after the eye wall had shifted and the sun would be out for an hour or two. We would drive to the beach, and look at the wave ravaged shore. Sometimes, after a particularly vicious one, like Gloria, we'd only be able to get within a few blocks of the beach, because we'd be met on the way by a tidal flood.

But on days where we could see the beach, it was amazing. The waves were huge, and dark, churning with the bottom of the sea all caught up in the salty water. You could taste the spray from the boardwalk and feel the mist on your eyelashes once you were closer. Hurricane waves always brought the best shells, but most were usually broken. Every once in a while, a giant intact conch shell, or huge oyster shell would be laying on the beach, waiting to be taken home, and my sister and I were always happy to oblige.

And now, in Virginia, closer to the mountains than the shore, I watch the hurricane approach on the weather station. From my window I can see the trees starting to bend over the neighbor's splitlevel house. Not how it should be - it changes a powerful hurricane into just another rainy day. I'm guessing it will take with it the last of summer, and before long, all the trees will be bare, and we'll be settling in for another winter, tucked inside our little house.