A few nights ago, I took shelter as a first-ever February tornado made landfall about 45 miles away and blew its way into Wisconsin’s weather history. In a state where almost any weather can happen at any time — I have heard that July and August are the only two months which have never seen snow — it’s getting even more ecumenical here with regard to weather events.
That’s not snow in my back yard: it’s hail. I remember one July in Ohio when I was equally startled to see hail. (Is hail expected in any season?)
It felt like a long week full of stress building up to the day the tornadoes came. I helped to put together a campus forum, and I stayed a few extra minutes to make sure it got off to a safe start. Then it was time to head back to my department, lock up for the night, and head for home. As soon as I got out of town I could see the strong flashes of lightning to the west.
When I got home I was still thinking that I would head out again to a show to which I had a ticket. But it wasn’t long before I decided that it might be wiser to put the car in the driveway and hunker down with my boys. Eldest leashed up the dog and Youngest baked up some snacks that we took with us to the basement. Two rounds of hail pounded against the house before it was calm again and we felt it was safe to return to the ground floor.
When I wasn’t hiding from tornadoes, planning campus events, or setting up writing retreats this week, I was preparing to clean the next typewriter on my list: my mother’s 1966 Smith-Corona Galaxie II. I did get some of the dust blown out of it, but one of the critical screws — to the ribbon cover — wouldn’t budge. So I put almost everything back together. I’ll take the screw’s twin to the hardware store this week to see if I can buy a better screwdriver (and perhaps pick up some extra screws in case I destroy this one in order to save it).
After I get the cover off and have better access for cleaning the hammers, I can work on repeated gentle cleaning of the keys themselves. Mom wasn’t particularly rough on the typewriter, but time in storage did take its toll.
Knitwise, the only thing I did with yarn this week was to completely frog a finished object (my apologies to the Noro triangle I knitted up a few years ago just to be making something). Oh, and move some project bags into a different space, and move some unallocated yarn to yet another different space.
Well, that’s not quite all. I did — finally — wash out the Leroy Cowl I made from Laurenspun and “block” it out to dry. This was one of the side effects of deciding to de-clutter my bedroom this afternoon instead of doing, well, just about anything else.
It will be resting and air-drying for about the next 24 hours, after which it may be cold enough again to give it a real-life test. Who knows? It’s frosty in the mornings, windy all day, and occasionally warm enough to spawn tornadoes.
While I was sorting through the boxes and bins of clutter in my bedroom, I found a steno pad (remember those?) in which I briefly started a journal in 1986. Those were college years for me, and I used it to take notes during campus visits by novelist Tom Wolfe, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and legend Kurt Vonnegut. I also used it to write drafts of a fiction workshop response and an article for the honors program newsletter, and brainstorm directions for two fiction pieces I was working on at the time. One ultimately wound up in my creative writing portfolio, and I have no idea what became of the other one. But how glad I am to discover the thinking behind those two stories!
During the time I spent in the basement, though, I peeked into several boxes of old notebooks, journals, and folders; the answer to the background of the forgotten story might lie in one of those cardboard moving boxes.
Chocolate Sheep 