The Light. Or Lack Thereof.

The light seeping in my windows is thin, watery. Coastal air clings to my skin like a nervous child. Even with a shawl its clamminess does not leave.

The garden is sopping, at least I do not have to water.

When it is grey and the cloud ceiling so close above my head it causes me to question everything. When it is sunny my mind is open and free as the sailing clouds, moving. When the word is grey and still, so I am I. the weather dictates so much.

I am a Coastal girl, but part of me longs on days like this for my interior territory. The corn and hemp growing lands with their muggy summers with jungle heat.

I long for the long hot days that bleed into long hot nights when the sounds are amplified by the moisture in the air. I tire of this grey cold.

I long to drive by tobacco fields that seem endless to the eye. To watch the waves of heat dance and waver and rise from the scorched earth. The birthing of brown, the green and the brutal blue of the sky.

Here I sit, under the heavy grey, imprisoned by geography to feeling this cold clinging damp pushing down on the earth from above. Because my mind is closed by this grey worries begin to press. There is none of the joy of imaginative wanderings. Fear seems deeper, more acute, knife edged.

Where is the sun? My skin longs for the heat and burn of the grandfather. The dry heat that desiccates the skin to drops of sweat that bead and roll. Savannah, parched by the unrelenting sun. And when I was there in the scorched dry I longed for an icy breeze on my face.

Why do we long for what we lack? Why can we not seek gratitude for what is?

This thin watering grey robs me of colour and life, and leaves me like a cold bowl of porridge. Lifeless and without the will to see beyond to reach beyond this grey, covering cloud that owns my world now.

Find me, grandfather sun. Reach from me from above, so that for one moment today I can remember long hot summer days of before. Long hot days gone.