Closing minutes of a long week

He sat next to the open patio door, listening to the gentle rain fall from the grey skies. He missed the thunderstorms in the midwest. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't accurately describe the experience to people who had lived in this state their entire lives. He remained convinced that nothing demonstrated the sheer power of nature more effectively than a good, house-shaking, window-rattling thunderstorm. From the black and threatening clouds, the wind that forced decades-old trees to bow before it, to the occaissional, unatural stillness and errie green skies that preceeded the tornados that such storms sometimes spawned, Washington simply had nothing to compare to it. When the infrequent thunderstorm did come through, its tame nature and distant thunder seemed to be a pale immitation of the real thing, an ersatz show of power, yet it was more than enough to frighten the natives.

Nevertheless, he enjoyed the tranquilizing effect that the soft, light rain was having on him. In the neighboring trees, he heard a night bird trilling, and he sat silently as the wind blew up around him, cloaking him in the scent of the wet earth.

He considered how much had happened in the last month and a half. It still seemed strange to him that he could feel something other than anger and irritation. It was stranger still that he frequently did. Of course, it had been so long, that even though he was feeling things again, it did mean that he knew exactly what he was feeling. The hardest thing for him was the clarity. He really wasn't prepared for the abilty to understand some much of what was going on around him, or how much he was actually responsible for it. Even though he had faith that it would, with time and work, all turn out better in the long run, that didn't stop the niggling little doubts from popping up like daisies in the field of his days as they streched out before him. But like any nuisance, they faded. He smiled. A miracle in itself.

He took another pull on the beer. The craft brews of the Northwest were pretty good, but there were times, he would surrender a testicle for an icy Molson.
He thought about how nice it would be to just go to the ocean. The roar of the waves crashing into the shore were a sound he never tired of. He shivered a little as the sun sank lower into the horizon, somewhere behind the clouds. Soon he'd have to go into the empty house. He knew it was temporary. She and the kids would return in just a few days, and he knew that she actually wanted to come home. That didn't make the evenings any easier. They never were when she was gone. Maybe he'd listen to the stereo for a while. The music kept awakening things in him that he thought long dead. He sighed, got up, and went back inside to meet with himself for a while.