They lied to me about the PNW
But I guess I've been lying to myself about fear for years, so...
For the past 35 or 36 years or so (with a couple of unfortunate exceptions) I have visited the Pacific Northwest with my wife, to see her family up here… always in the summer. Without fail, it has been stunningly beautiful and lovely weather.
“Oh sure,” my PNW friends and family would say, “but all the rest of the year it’s rainy and blah. So grey, so dark, so wet. It wears you down. Seasonal Affective Disorder and whatnot. We flee to warmer brighter climes in midwinter, just for a sanity break, to feel the sun on our skin for a few precious days before we must submerge ourselves under the wet blanket that is Pacific Northwest life for nine months out of the year.”
Since I had no reason to doubt them, I worried about how I might adjust when Kathryn and I realized the time had come to move up to Washington State full time.
Well, here is what a “grey, overcast, glum winter day” looked like out my window this morning:
Yes, the infinitesimal proto-rain graced us just a few times in the morning, for about five minutes at a time, while the sky still looked mostly like this. The light was brighter than my photo would lead you to believe. It was a nice day, not cold enough or wet enough to merit a jacket. And I am a desert rat, not used to wet climates.
Real rain finally arrived in the evening, between five and eight PM. (“Real rain,” as I understand it, is the kind that drums audibly on your roof and leaves puddles on the sidewalk.) But it only rained for about ten minutes at a time before slacking off to a friendly drizzle again.
(The morning “rain” didn’t even qualify as a drizzle in my book. It was more like ghost rain: “Did I just feel something? It felt like some kind of rain… but it’s invisible, and I can’t feel it anymore… oh, there it is again, the faintest rumor 1of moisture! And tiny droplets are forming mysteriously, gradually, on my windshield as I stand beside my car counting the patches of blue sky…”)
It’s April now. I have “survived” an entire Tacoma winter, including at least two snow days (no more than two inches of snow maybe less, each time) and enjoyed it immensely. Where is all the rain? Where is the midwinter darkness, the glum overcast ceiling of impenetrable depression-clouds?
Actually, forget I asked.
I’m good!
And on behalf of my PNW friends, family, and neighbors who would rather not have to deal with summer-caliber crowds all year long: “Oh yeah, horrible weather, only visit in the summer! Don’t even think of moving up here!” ;-)
It’s a good thing the weather has been so mild, because the inner work threatens to be plenty stormy, if I can just break through… Geoffrey Baines offered the helpful metaphor of “spadework.” He says,
It’s somewhat like archeology.
Firstly the trench is dug where the best indicators suggest something significant will be found.
A corner is caught showing that the indications
were a little right, but also wrong,
So the trench is extended in a different direction, uncovering more of what lies beneath.
What you are, and what you do,
lie beneath layers of detritus that must be removed
with curiosity, but also
with time and focus
to uncover more…
Dreamwhispering makes for a good spade, and
a journal helps us not to lose what we find.
Is that buried thing the corner of a sarcophagus? An entire crypt? Or perhaps a treasure vault… in all the best stories, it’s all three. And I’ll need to defeat the curse in order to enjoy the treasure. We’ll see just how closely my hidden fears follow the story tropes.
The real focus for now is the patient spadework to dig them up and identify them… and the journaling, writing down whatever I discover, so that I don’t lose what is desperately trying to remain lost to me.
How about you?
Are you involved in any inner spadework of your own?
For yourself or for the characters in your stories?
I welcome comments from any experienced archaeologists of the soul, too.
Maybe I should contact Geoffrey about this “dreamwhispering” idea.
For my WriterMBA friends who all agreed on this one thing: no, I have not begun therapy yet, but I will, after the LA Times Festival of Books.
Ghost rain. Nice.