A Touch of Supernatural

I won’t be getting to swim in the lake this year.

The lake at the state park wasn’t supposed to close until the eighth, and I thought I’d surely have a breakthrough in replacing the ill-fated car by the eighth, but then I saw that they had to close the lake beach due to bacteria. I don’t know where the bacteria came from. Such a thing can be caused by the water getting to low and too warm after a drought, and we’re still having a severe drought in Northern Appalachia.

A piece of my soul died when I heard the news.

It’s Labor Day this Monday, and I’ve only been in swimming twice all summer: once at the lake before the car died and once walking to the little municipal pool. Swimming and hiking are the only forms of exercise I like, and I’ve been cut off from both since the middle of June. Two whole months of colitis. Seventy-two days of a car with a dead piston, never going for a drive out to the country. It’s been ninety degrees every afternoon since I don’t even remember when, and it doesn’t get down below 70 at night. It’s rained about three times in the past few weeks. The grass is half dead, and I feel as if I’m as badly off. What a terrible summer.

The other night was one of those rains. Everything was beautiful, clean, muddy and alive for about half an hour, and then the healing downpour turned to stifling mist. I went outside after it was dark, and buried the compost. I chopped the head off my very biggest sunflower, which had dropped over and lost all its petals. The head was as big around as a turkey platter, studded with a thousand little seeds. If you look at natural things closely enough, they’ll look supernatural. Natural things are uncanny and impossibly strange. Some of them look as though they came out of a high fantasy and some look like they came out of a horror story. Sunflowers, when they bud and after they droop, look like alien beings. The head looked like it would come to life and eat me.

I left it on the drying platform, as a gift to the songbirds.

The next morning it was still stifling hot, and more humid than ever. I rolled over and whispered that prayer I’ve been saying ever since the PTSD got so bad that I couldn’t be a regular churchgoer again. “Please don’t hurt me. I did my best. I’m sorry I failed you. Please don’t hurt me.”

Junia, the female cardinal, was perched on the giant sunflower head, preaching the Office of Readings over breakfast. “Chip chip! Chip chip!”

I darted outside to pick an armload of ripe tomatoes, but that was as far as I got. The backyard was an oven. When I darted back in, I had to go back to bed for a few minutes to bask in the gusts from the noisy window air conditioner. All I wanted was to glide back and forth in the lake like a crocodile, swimming, loving nature.

When Adrienne got home from school, I was reminded that I promised a trip to Dollar Tree to spend a gift her grandmother sent. Michael said he’d take care of buying coffee and eggs, which were about all the grownups had money for, but Adrienne was richer than we were with twenty dollars on a card. I found myself on a sweltering bus, cursing everyone who opens the windows on public transit instead of shutting them tight so the air conditioning can work.

At dollar tree, they’d already laid out their Autumn things. The summer fare, the jump ropes and sidewalk chalk and bubbles, were all jumbled on the clearance rack. The Halloween goodies were prominent: several aisles of lurid black and purple bric-a-brac. Oddly sized bags of cheap off-brand candy. Foam tombstones with funny phrases on them. Plastic skeletons in a variety of sizes. Adrienne filled a cart within fifteen minutes. We’re going to have the best haunted front yard in the neighborhood.

On the way back, the clouds rolled in.

I found myself riding under a patch of blue sky between thunderstorms. It looked like it was raining to the south of us in Mingo Junction, and all the north in Toronto. The clouds over West Virginia were puffy and white, but the sun was going down past a great big black stormcloud over Cadiz. And then I saw the rainbow– both of them. There were two. The larger one on the outside was so faint I could barely make it out. The one on the inside was marvelously bright, impossibly bright, bright like a storybook illustration and not like real life.

By the time the bus got halfway home and turned around in the hospital parking lot, the larger rainbow had faded away, but the small one was even more impossibly brilliant.

As we went back past the Catholic High School, the rainbow was half a bow, still too bright to be real.

As we drove down the main arterial that’s risibly called Sunset Boulevard, the rainbow shrunk to a rectangle of color on gray. And then it dissolved.

If you look at natural things carefully enough, they’ll start to look supernatural. By the time I got off the bus, I was sure I’d seen a sign from God.

Maybe everything will work out somehow.

Maybe the heat will break, eventually.

Maybe good times are ahead. Maybe the dealer still has that awful blue car. I’ll be able to drive to West Virginia to see the fall leaves, or take Adrienne to Lake Erie in September when the lodging is cheap but some of those ridiculous tourist attractions are still open. Maybe I’ll buy this house from the landlord, and fix it up and find happiness in the place that’s hurt me so much.

Or maybe it was all just the sun peeking through raindrops at the right angle.

When I got home, the cardinals were tearing at the sunflower head. “Chip chip!”

The sun was down, and the air was cool.

I think it’s going to be all right.