Cool
gray late-summer rain sounds like a proletariat piano solo. All that indulgent,
melancholy plink-a-plinking. The morning is overcast with memory. Almost expect
to look out the window and find bare trees standing in piles of wet potato
peelings, bark dark black from cold-cold rain-rain-rain. But it’s not the end
of the world yet. It’s too early. It’s only August. (And
Congress is on recess.)
Still,
the mind is easier to trick than a little dog. It feels like Fall. So maybe it
is the Fall. Maybe it’ll keep on raining for a couple days straight like it did
here in southeast Minnesota two-years-ago and flood green
valleys with mud, roadoil and pesticide. If not here, someplace else.
It’s
raining. It’s August. The sky is falling.
That’s
how gloom and doom works.
Gets
in your head.
Tangles
up your wires.
Been
so much gummy blather and bilious gunk belching from all the windbags
blowing-bare the branches of the historic
health care reform debate in America. Almost forget how vigorous and fresh
the young plum tree looked last spring. Fat new buds sprouting blood blue rose
petals infused with green. Bark the color of red cabbage. Nothing quite like
the young plum in spring.
But
spring is gone again, a sanguine mood that’s fast-passed, or fog condensing
into rain as the dark sun rises. Then it starts to pizzle and grumble. Got to
fight the urge to crawl back into bed, pull the covers up over the ears, damp
that mournful-damn drip-drip-drip of pessimism and fear. Still summer. Pick
plums instead.
Got
to look a fat ripe plum right in the eye. Don’t be afraid. Shovel it into your
mouth like you’re kissing a trout. Take a bite.
Congressman
Tim Walz lobbed plums into a cloudy DFL fundraiser last weekend, “We’re gonna
get there,” he said. “We’re gonna get healthcare reform. Is it gonna be
everything you want? Probably not. But we’ve got to do something.”
Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America.
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