Stormy Weather

Megan and I were moving into my old house on Chatham Lane. A couple had been living there for the 10 years since Liz and I moved away. As we inspected the house, we noticed the couple had randomly left things around the house with notes attached. They were things they really thought we would use and enjoy, but most of the stuff was just junk, like a lawnmower motor or a box of photos of someone else’s family.

Later I was in a field in Virginia. I was on a road trip of some kind with an unidentified male companion. It was unclear whether or not our relationship was romantic. This field was a stop that I frequently made when driving up the east coast. As I stood there, sometimes there was an ocean nearby and sometimes there wasn’t. There was a storm coming, and although it didn’t look like it was going to be a bad one, it reminded me of a really bad one I’d previously been caught in in that same field.  I was describing the previous storm to the guy I was with, and desperately trying to convey how bad it was. He was nodding but I could tell he didn’t understand how terrible the storm had really been.

I walked over to a picnic area and there were some very cute gerbils running around the wooded area surrounding it. I was talking to the gerbils in a baby talk voice, telling them how cute they were. One of the gerbils picked up a little stick so I sat on the ground and jokingly threw a tiny pine cone at it as if we were playing baseball. To my surprise, the gerbil actually hit the pine cone and began running tiny bases. I tried to tag the gerbil out with the pine cone, but I missed and he made it all the way around the bases. I stroked its back and in my baby talk voice I said “Look who made a little homerun!”