waves away

It's been in the neighborhood of 80 degrees for months and months and months. Even when it has begun to cool down at night, and when the widget weather says 71⁰, by the time you get into the exposed car in the afternoon it's well over 80. Rain is a stranger. Whether there was ever a spring I don't recall. So let's have a little winter story. Let's put on a black turtleneck, black pants, thick striped knee socks, black boots. Pack a four-day duffel the night before, because the valet arrives in the first blue feathers of dawn; the train leaves for Vancouver at 8am. Don't forget your passport. Second week of January means time for the MLA conference, hosted this year in the northern city called Vancouver . Jessica and I will take our act international as I drag her down my Canadian memory lane. The weather will be milder than it was in Chicago last year, I will not drink red wine, I will not get violently ill, I will get serious and go to fascinating litera...

On the morning of July 24th, it was raining, and I was happy. Our ten-years-together anniversary weekend would be cocooned in a cozy drizzle, just like the late-summer months of our courtship had been -- after the initial caution of wondering-is-this-the-one broke with the heat wave, when we floated among the Bumbershoot crowds, a private island, kissing under the shelter of every dripping tree. As it was then, the parched world was now drinking deeply. A lunch-time Bremerton ferry brought us to Seabeck just as the sun shot through the clouds, spotlighting our little beach-front retreat with its overturned row boats, fishing rods, and oyster shells scattered across the bulwark; its tree house and porch swing; a bottle of wine and garden bouquet left with a "happy anniversary" card on the breakfast table by the owner. She shortly came down from the main house we were nestled under to point out all the amenities, apologizing for the burn ban that kept her from providing her fa...