Twin Palms

These are the trees I can hear from my upstairs desk. They rattle and hiss and crackle in the wind, and they say the winds hit 75 miles per hour in the neighboring hills. It never stopped raining today, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes sheets of water blowing down the street. So many downed trees, broken power lines, traffic accidents, flooding. This road’s closed, now that one. A lane’s open going north, but now southbound is closed again. I experience none of this because we just stay home and build a fire. You can feel the wind blow through the house if you stand near the older windows and doors. 

The farm workers in the small community of Pajaro, just south of us, are still not allowed to go back to their flooded homes, even to get their stuff. They have no work because so much acreage was damaged by water when the levee broke; they say it will be weeks before the fields are usable again. Some crops, like strawberries, are lost for the entire year. 

When will we stop talking about the extremes of this weather? When will this extreme weather stop? When will I find something else to photograph? I’ve lost track again of what day it is. It’s one of the rainy days. There’s still a string of them coming.