Far across the broad Atlantic where the storms do rage severe

[sovay]

Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.

Comments

[sovay]

I love this description of the sea. Also, you look e mermaid in that picture.

Thank you!

Given your deeply poetic

[jesse_the_k]

understanding of the geologic, animal, and botanical regions of the area, it's evidence that you are a mermaid.

Have you read any Marcia Bjornerud? She's a local hero--geology professor at Lawrence who also writes eloquently about geology for the lay reader (in books and The New Yorker). I recently finished Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks and I was entranced.

Re: Given your deeply poetic

[sovay]

it's evidence that you are a mermaid.

Thank you! I will accept your argument.

Have you read any Marcia Bjornerud? She's a local hero--geology professor at Lawrence who also writes eloquently about geology for the lay reader (in books and The New Yorker). I recently finished Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks and I was entranced.

I have not, but that book looks wonderful.

"The tiny spheres of quartz dimly recall their youth deep inside Proterozoic mountains, when they were part of a tight-knit community in granite. They attest to how erosion dismantled the mountains, how rain dissolved their neighboring minerals, how they alone survived. They remember tumbling in the surf on a tropical Cambrian beach, then lying still beneath a heavy blanket of other strata, hardening slowly into sandstone. The sand recalls how, eons later, it was excavated by rivers, then rasped by glaciers that disbanded the grains and scattered them in a meltwater diaspora. This sand has had a long and complicated journey, but this is probably its first bus ride."

Thank you for the heads-up!