Waiting It Out

Like everyone else. we waited around yesterday, but because the body will stay for only so long in a state of alert we also watched some TV.  I myself swam with this Scooby Doo fan, out to the swim raft, onto whose ladder a water-spider had tied a webby netful of babies.This same little guy’s mum, who is our first-born and is seen to the left in profile, told us not to climb onto the raft. If we did we might dislodge this one mother spider's silk-sack of webbing, inside which her two dozen tiny progeny trembled tinily.So we paddled around for an hour without once resting, he using his Spider Man boogy-board and I on my  own two legs, trained at age five to do the Elementary Back Stroke.Our other daughter meanwhile, whipped up an Indian food feast that took eight hours to prepare. (When you make the cheese, then press the cheese, then cube it, then deep-fry it, all so you can mix it into the Saag Paneer and the Shahi Paneer, it takes eight hours at least and these were but two of several  different dishes. She also did a homemade banana later cake.)Our other young grandson played a really hard game with Uncle Jeff to pass the hours. This was after Jeff and Old Dave and the little boys’ other mother Chris had taken and moved indoors every lawn chair, houseplant, loose branch and wind chime.... And then, again like everyone else, we waited.And the storm came and for five hours put us in the dark with no water. When the juice came back on it seemed like a miracle. After supper and before bed, the Defender of All Spiders was limping a little. She spoke of a hitch in her hip-flexer and so for the first time in five years I practiced some deep-tissue massage. On her. To release the TFL if I could and just bring some freshly oxygenated blood to the area.Later, as the wind still howled, lashing the trees outside our bedroom window I worried I had gone too deep on her. She is pregnant and what if I lifted one of the complicated membranous ‘pegs’ anchoring the delicate water balloon of packaging in which her child floats, disturbing him/her just as she had feared disturbing the water spider's babies? On a day filled with wind and flood you worry about such things, even as you count yourself safe in your shelter from the storm.

 many trees and branches down on the innocent-looking morning after