"I, too, am my father's son, and he could not fix much of anything at all."

I sit between storms this morning. Snow still covers the ground from that last one and the weather app warns of worse than that last one to come. Pending seems a perpetual state in these mid-latitudes. Living here yields a life spent somewhere in-between. When will that next storm arrive? There's always a next front just over the horizon. Will it come from the north, west, south, or, that most dreaded of all directions here, the east? Storms from the east seem to violate the first principle of western weather, which almost always travels on the eastbound train. When a counter-clockwise flow kicks in, though, it means heavy wintertime snow or battering summertime thunderstorms. Winter gets called for a day or two of spring before resuming its seasonal status quo again. Summer snow's not unknown. Like everywhere, the locals here proudly proclaim that if the current weather doesn't suit you, just wait a minute or two and another climate might just pass through. It's high desert with seasonal monsoons, crazier than a flock of schizophrenic loons.

Snow serves as the iconic image for all of Colorado, though peaks, let alone snow-capped peaks, do not cover most of the state's surface. The Eastern half more closely resembles neighboring Kansas and nobody can even see the Rockies from that aspect. Roaring storm fronts, though, seem the common denominator; always something different just over every horizon. My neighbors think me crazy. My petunias hold me in no greater esteem. I figure that I can hold those plants in the garage until the next Spring-like between, cold snaps amount to little more than brief interruptions of some more temperate intrusion. I imagine Colorado to be a near perfect mirror of the human condition, sometimes here, other times there, but largely somewhere in-between.

Full immersion might seem to be the goal. The plain fact that it's essentially impossible, hardly worth mentioning, for a decent aspiration simply must carry some shadow of impossibility to achieve adequate believability. Low hanging fruit never could qualify as aspirational, which must carry a seat-of-the-pants probability of actually occurring. Full immersion here features brief dips into differing pools, each plunge rudely interrupted just about the time I seem to be getting the hang of being there. An alarming somewhere else will most certainly elbow her way into the bathhouse to pull my attention away from any particular in, back to some other out-there again. Some disruption always seems to need attending to. I live on the edge of a vast prairie dog town with infinite inhabitants, each aching for its share of attention; Whack-A-Mole gone all exponential.

Much gets left half-done here. Roadwork always runs the gauntlet between bookending seasons, with even summertime continually interrupting herself for unscheduled storms if only because it's the norm. Regularly scheduled programming features many late-breaking headline interruptions. Something always elbows its way into the middle of something else. Staying focused seems a fundamentally bogus expectation. Here, I strive to improve my skills for coping with endless disruption. Something will most certainly nudge me off even my best defended spot. I'm forever trying to get back to where I thought I should have been before. By the time I arrive, that moment's inevitably lost. I have the attention span of a fruit fly now.

My writer's chair broke down this week. A mortise and tendon arm joint cleanly busted its tongue, deflating one wing. I fled to another chair, but found writing extremely difficult to accomplish there. I felt distracted and ill at ease, and writing demands a certain background ease. I revisited a craftsman woodworker to see if he'd consent to mend my throne, though the work seemed well beneath his skill level. He mostly crafts custom furniture, but he seemed to understand how precious that shopworn thirties semi-reclining club chair is to me, and so he agreed to perform the necessary surgery, though it would be a distraction from his usual focus. "I'm my father's son," he said, "and he could fix anything." I replied that I, too, am my father's son, and he could not fix much of anything at all.

The way it is cannot serve as grist for any fixing. It is just the way it is, and nobody should ever get themselves immersed in the business of fixing the way it just is. One can certainly hope for better, though the price of pursuing that particular purpose might prove to reliably produce little more than a succession of broken hearts. Still, the heart fills to close to its full capacity in the period leading up to its being broken again, ample justification for jousting at another windmill. I'm in Spring this morning, pending Winter, trending, the weather app insists, toward the Dead of Winter by the middle of next week before resuming Fall again.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz