It’s a week from the end of January, and we’re under tornado watch and I heard treefrogs driving home from the laundromat tonight. This South Carolina weather is different! When out today, I said, “This is tornado weather.” It’s hard to explain but it’s unusually WARM, plus cloudy/rainy, plus a light wind that feels eerie somehow. Maybe it’s a change in the air. It feels like the calm before the storm.
Treefrogs are the coolest sounding thing ever. They are LOUD when it’s rainy like this. Very loud. If you get out away from houses or near a pond, you hear them. They were so loud, and this area is so rural, I heard them when I rolled my window down, since it felt too stuffy in the car. They have a loud trilling sound that almost crackles at the same time. Kind of like a high-pitched cat purr combined with running a pencil down the piano keys.
I am oddly unable to stress about my classes this semester. I think last semester was high stress, and came after finishing the PhD, passing the defense and graduating a year before. It was all too much. No one understands what it did to me, to just finish the diss. I truly believe it took 2 years off my life. It’s like knowing that you can only hold your breath for 2 minutes but swimming through an area which required you to hold it for 4. And you made it. After that, you just refuse to ever put yourself in that stress position again. And it’s real hard to gear up to revise it into a book. I just have to do it.
Doctor Grandma 
January 25, 2010 at 10:51 pm |
Somehow I have a picture in my head of tree frogs driving with baskets of laundry in the backs of their cars.