Musician's Widow

In direct contrast of yesterday’s beauty, today has been a dark, rainy day.

I love rain as much as I love sunshine. Rain brings life, the much needed water to sustain plants, animals and humans alike.

Sleeping to rainfall is one of my favorite things. I didn’t want to get up today! I wanted to just keep sleeping in my dark, cool bedroom as the rain pattered on the roof.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I’ll play ambient rain noise. It is almost foolproof, putting me to sleep quickly.

This rain is the precursor to colder temperatures for the rest of the week. So long mid-70s. Hello mid-50s. Back to normal November temperatures. It is as it should be….rainy days, sunny days. We need them both. I love ‘em both.

“Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.”
– Author Unknown

If you search my Flickr photostream for the word “Fall” you get 136 photos back… a lot when you consider that I’m pretty sure I’ve failed to tag all my fall photos with “Fall” and I’ve only been seriously keeping up my Flickr page for about three years.

Growing up in Texas, Fall basically meant football season. The temperatures would go from sweltering to warm with the occasional chill in the wind. Past that, Fall = Football. Period.

Oh okay, it meant a bunch of birthdays, Halloween and Thanksgiving. And school pictures. But past that? Fall colors were what you saw only by cutting out construction paper leaves. You saw them in decorations bought at arts & crafts fairs. Or you saw them in magazines and on TV. But in Texas? It just goes summer leaves to no leaves at all in the blink of an eye. No magical color change.

Then I moved to Tennessee.

I still remember I had just recently moved here, and I was driving to our apartment from the store and I was struck by the colors all around me. I called my brother to squeal on his voicemail about how pretty it was. I don’t know why that memory remains with me, but it does.

Fall tends to not love me back. I get a yearly sinus infection, and I end up staring out the window at the pretty in misery. But it never stops me from still anticipating the season with glee.

My first visit to a "pumpkin patch" in 2006

Pumpkin patches to visit. Corn mazes to traverse.

There’s Pumpkin Spiced Lattes to drink.

Its time to get out warmer clothing.

And the colors… oh the colors! It starts with a little tinge of color in a tree here and a tree there. Then you start to notice all the trees are slowly changing from green to reds, yellows and oranges. The leaves that have already fallen crunch under your feet as you walk through the grass, and they speckle the drive way with their brilliant beauty.  Sometimes when the wind blows, they fall around you like glitter.

My husband and I like to go on drives through the country to look at all the colors. Those construction paper leaves of elementary school have nothing on the real thing! I stare out the window — be it my living room window or the passenger side window of our truck — in awe. Mesmerized by the changes this season brings.

We’ve had our first freeze warning of the year… though the extreme cold is short lived for now. We’ll be back in the 70s this weekend, just in time for a group trip to a corn maze where we’ll laugh and get lost among the cornstalks. A hayride will make us feel like kids again, and a cup of apple cider will warm the soul as much as the tummy.

Yes, Fall is definitely my favorite season of the year. And I plan to enjoy everything I can about it before winter gets its grip on the area.

July 1st. Seventh month of the year. There’s no denying we are headed towards Christmas now.

I’ve actually spent most of the last year looking towards this month. My cousin is getting married in a couple weeks, and I’m her MOH. So even though I’ve not been terribly active in the planning, much of what I’ve done — or not done — has been in anticipation of this month.

I’ve spent just enough energy focusing on this month that it almost feels like, “About dang time!” While in the same breath its, “So much still to do! Ah!”

I don’t head to Texas for just shy of two more weeks, but I’m so in the mode already it could just as well be tomorrow.

Except I’ve not packed.

And there’s no flight waiting for me at BNA.

I’m hoping that sometime this month I’ll take some time to do summer things… like go out on the lake. Catch a baseball game. Barbecue out back with friends.

My bikini is on my dresser and I’ve lost just shy of 10 lbs. I need some lake time!! Summer fun has not yet begun and its not far from being over!

Ultimately, time flies and even as I strive to stop and enjoy the moment, there is more I want to do before we are welcoming in August. So here is my goal for July: enjoy beautiful weddings and have a little fun in the sun!

Rain drops on hydrangeas.

Today was day two of summer showers in the Nashville area — today had more “severe” storms than yesterday, featuring golf ball-size hail and heavy downpours — which has kept temperatures in the 70s and made the atmosphere crystal clear.

It’s been lovely. Call me crazy, but I love a good downpour. (As long as its not featuring tornadoes, and I don’t like hail.)  I love how clean everything gets. Rain makes the grass green, makes flowers bloom.

I love the way the sound relaxes the body. I haven’t heard rain on a tin roof in a long time, but I remember it being a glorious sound. I’ll occasionally play a rainfall sound to help sleep come quickly.

This morning, I was awakened by the roll of thunder. I opened my eyes, and I realized the bedroom was as dark as night. I rolled over. I closed my eyes. I drifted back into a deep, deep sleep.

I sipped coffee to rainfall. I snuggled a shaking cat as thunder got particularly loud mid-afternoon. I ducked back inside away as yet another storm chased me away from photographing beautiful pink and purple sunset skies.

All day I wished I could send the rain back home to Texas, where the drought is awful. My parent’s lawn has ceased to even exist for lack of rain. Dust covers every surface. Their dog seeks the cooling effects of a small kiddie pool, while rain stays away and temperatures have hit the 100s. I felt a little guilty for enjoying a rainy, lovely day here in Nashville.

Tomorrow temps will probably be back in the 90s. The cool, fresh weather just a memory. Lawn mowers will fire up, and the water bottle will be refilled multiple times. Summer is here and it’s not going anywhere soon. I’m just glad I got the opportunity to enjoy today for all its cleansing goodness.

I’ve spent the last three days watching the weather almost non-stop. I’m fried. I could never be a weather forecaster. I just… couldn’t.

Monday, I watched the storms roll through Arkansas as I helped my parents get back home to Texas. I watched the storms move across the state, and I’d call my parents when I felt they needed to get off the road and wait a storm out. As they made it through safely, I continued to watch… my heart aching for those in the path of the tornadoes and flooding.

The next day, I watched to get a feel for what was headed this direction, and I also watched the weather back in Texas… once again giving my parent’s updates as they ran errands. Texas needs rain so bad… so, so, so bad. But the storms that popped up had a violent hand. I feared for the safety of friends, family and strangers alike.

By the time we went out last night, my stomach was in knots. I feared what the next day would bring to us. I once again had a heavy heart for those affected by the wrath of nature.

We got home from being downtown, and in an eerie similarity to almost a year ago, my husband and I slept in shifts… keeping weary eyes on the radar.

Thankfully, we do have a basement to retreat to if it got ugly. But we talked about, “What would we do if…?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around the rest of that sentence.

I did get some sleep, being jerked awake by National Weather Service warnings blasting out of the TV. Here in Nashville, we were thankfully spared. Murfreesboro sustained a lot of damage, but Nashville itself was okay. However, we watched with knotted stomachs as cities in Alabama were hit hard. And we still watch as I type this as the storms continue to march across Georgia, east Tennessee, etc. The death count rises. The video and photos tug at my heart.

I am so thankful to have been spared, but I ache at the same time for those who WERE affected. I keep reading posts on Twitter… people who are pausing to reflect on the day’s events. We are humbled by nature once again.

I grew up in “Tornado Alley.”  We not only had fire drills, we had tornado drills. I grew up with this stuff… and even with that being said, I will NEVER “get used to” this stuff. The fear I have for them… the respect I give to them… tornadoes are horrible.  Tornadoes are humbling. Tornadoes remind us all that we don’t have control over everything, and all we can do sometimes is hope and pray for the best. And if “the best” is not what we get, we hope and pray for the strength to carry on and pick up the pieces.

When I was little, the idea that a groundhog could decide if we’d have an early spring or not made perfect sense. The whimsical nature of an animal seeing his shadow or not being a determining factor in the weather was fun, and most importantly, something to take very serious.

As I got older, I decided a groundhog in Pennsylvania could not in any way determine what the weather would do in Texas. So I’d look at the weather on Groundhog Day wherever I was and make my own decision. If I saw my own shadow it meant more winter. No shadow, early Spring. Who cared what PunxsutawneyPhil said, really?

Then I saw the movie Groundhog Day and, of course, the day was never the same again.

It’s been years since I really paid any attention to what the almighty rodent weatherman had to say. This year, though, I jokingly cared. Its been a brutal winter!  I’m ready for warmer temps (but not the tornadoes it’ll bring with it).

Let it be known, Texas cold is different from Tennessee cold. I’ve said it for awhile, but the last two days I was very much reminded of it. The cold snap to hit here as part of the big system that’s taken over much of the US just cuts right through you. I can take 15° in Nashville a lot faster than 30º in Texas. It’s just a DIFFERENT cold. It pierces even the walls of houses, making heaters fight to try to even remotely keep up. (Hence the rolling blackouts that are occurring across the state today!) The heaviest of sweaters that I brought really doesn’t keep me warm. I don’t even want to be outside a minute!

The fabulous Lotus made a blog post last month about how you shouldn’t judge what a person considers cold because its all individual. (I like how she puts it way better, so go read that first. I’ll wait.) I get so amused when someone tells me,  “Oh this is probably nothing to you these days” in regards to the cold. Well, I can definitely tell you that while I feel the heat down here in summer a lot more than I used to feel it, what winter there is in Texas STINKS. I can handle 40º+ better, but you dip any lower than that? NUH-UH!

I’ve not been up to the northern states in winter… okay I’ve not been to the northern states at all… so I can’t say what the cold and snow is like there. But I can say for certainty… I’ll take Nashville’s snow-crazed-stock-up-on-bread-and-milk-cancel-school winter over Texas’s damp, iced (albeit short) winter.

All that being said, I am very glad Punxsutawney Phil says early Spring this year. I think we all deserve some early warmth. Between record snowfalls and crazy temperature drops, I’m ready to be past winter. So thank you dear rodent, I’m going to hold you to your prediction.