Rain

Buckets. Flooding in areas of poor drainage, like the top of my complex driveway. The driveway then slopes downward so that when you go out to your car, you're standing in an ankle-deep river.

It's raining cats, dogs, and alligators, I like to say. The ducks stand around confused. They've gotten used to the drought-like conditions, the receding retention ponds, the algae. The turtles are in heaven. The nutria all look like beavers, soaked and waddling.

Feast or famine. Florida used to run on a schedule—blessed sunshine til about 3 p.m., then rain for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and a half, then sun again til nightfall. One of my first memories of Florida was standing in my aunt and uncle's driveway in Tampa, listening to the rain coming down the street. Up north, it rained up, down, and sideways, but it always rained in the backyard when it was raining in the front. Florida's a duck of a different color.

This summer though, and the past two or three, come to think of it, tropical parchment. I'm sure the folks in Arizona and New Mexico would just shake their heads at our complaining, but it's still not enough rain. I'm glad my attempts at planting failed again, because they would've failed anyway. I need a backyard, a hose, some real earth, some real plants. Hell, some real grass too, not this stuff that comes in blocks and doesn't take root half the time. I lie flat on the grass in my inlaws' yard and feel the difference at some fundamental level. I am a child of the seasons.

Man, I need to write more. Been reading Poisonwood Bible again by Kingsolver; it's an addiction, a phenomenally written tome that speaks to me on several planes and cracks open the little room where the muse lives and lurks in my head, forcing out these bursts of creativity that dribble out of my fingers onto the keyboard like a tiny waterfall. My novel, Zoe, sits in her hospital room aching for movement, for something to take her beyond the stuck-in-the-mud place where she is now, trapped inside her own head, my own head, praying for some magical release, some wonder drug to strip off her skin and lay her bare for the final edit. It's so damn close. I keep saying, "if I can just get past this Avon walk, this holiday season, this SC move...," but deep down, I know they're excuses, that there's more of me to be given to the novel. I'm just afraid of its lack of truth, afraid it needs full rewrites in spots, because I'm not happy with how fictional it became, afraid it needs to be more autobiographical for my message to get across effectively, afraid that if I keep at it like this I'll never be satisfied and it'll never get finished...