A Break in the Wet Curtain

Almost 3 hours ago I witnessed something so joyful that I am numb with excitement.

The San Francisco Bay Area has been deluged with water for the past month. It has rained and rained and rained.

In light of the Passover holiday, I was expecting Noah to pull in to the Wharf and offer a discount on his cruise ship.

This idea dissipated this afternoon. I attended an interview of Judith Ford, a former Alameda County judge and early computer techie (her former colleague wrote a little program called Microsoft Word). I found her fascinating. An amazing woman who was on the forefront of a lot of tech changes and she's a Berkeley native who just drove through her barriers...sole African American woman in her field when she started at Livermore Labs in 1950-something. (Remember, she didn't have the right to vote yet.) But she was writing machine code! GO JUDITH!

Anyway, at the end of our young women's interview with her, the clouds broke and while we toured her home, I was drawn to the balcony and the light.

From the sheet of grey that covered the sky, streaks of light burned their way through. And then the wall of cloud became strokes of cirrus. The diffused light became brighter and gold began to fill the sky.

My God, I thought. There's the sun.

The gutters in the Oakland hills were filled with water, rushing at gravity's call downward. The waters tumbled, and the ground glistened. All smelled fresh and clean. And the glow from the sky found its way into my light-starved pores.

This evening's sunset was amazing. Absolutely breathtaking.

Pink and gold and just illuminating gorgeous shapes of clouds. Shapes of horses drawing Helios' (Apollo's) chariot across the sky, westward drew me into the world of mythology. Ancestors creating stories to understand the mystery of the world.

And so now the sun has set and I am left with the imprint of gold and pink in my mind, glistening streets, and I am satisfied that the convenant with All that creates the weather is not completely broken. That nature has mercy on those of us drowning in tears of spring showers. We have reprieve. We have been given the gift of sunshine.

Ashe.