You can see that weather affects me.
Today the winds are taking over southern France and blowing like crazy, just like in the drawings by our friend, Olivier Renou, at the open market, who is a brilliant graphic artist and who puts his dreams on tee-shirts and sells like crazy to the tourists. A sad aside here is that he recently lost his love of his life and partner, Arantxa Patino, and I can’t imagine anything worse than that mama or papa would lose one or the other of themselves, and she was young, 46 years old, so sad, so sad and mama visits him at our open market every week and watches for improvement, but he is healing slowly. Perhaps pouring himself into his art help some, but I don’t think that would help me much if I lost mama or papa. I might just use up one of my nine lives and get on with it, hoping to come back for another one when I was over my grief.
But one of his lovely tee-shirt drawings (see his work at www.ceminion.com) is of the tramontane, which this wind today is not because of being the wind from the est, but both are so wild that I see what they do as similar. Remember the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is caught up in the tornado and all sorts of objects fly past her as they whirl around in the vortex of the wind? Well, that’s what it’s like here out on the terrace where I went just to spite mama and prove to her that I am a courageous kitty even though it was pouring rain and the wind making the shutters sing and slap and so there I was when suddenly the plastic garden chair I was under whipped up into the air and flung itself across the garden into the fava bean patch and boy, I was outta there quicker n’ a gnat could swim a dipper. So much for courage. Flying objects and kitties do NOT get along.
Sometimes one’s little soft place on the couch looks very, very inviting.
Everything started blowing around and mama was chasing the chairs and the bird bath (where I have my morning drink even though I know there have been fine feathered creatures stickin’ their beaks into MY water) looked like the North Sea (whatever that is) and rain was pounding against the windows and cleaning them up very nicely and it’s still that way out there—two more days of this and me without my training program in the garden so how in the hell am I supposed to lose weight so that mama can see my so-called waist. Hah, that’s a laugh. She’s been pokin’ around my little body all morning looking for my ribs and hip bones and uh, oh, I think she just found one, ouch! I’m outta here…
It can blow very badly here in southern Alberta, Canada. We have Chinook winds, which are warm enough to melt deep snow in the winter but still feel pretty cold. And it blows in the summer when it’s dry and dust gets everywhere. All things being equal, I’d rather be suffering from the wind in France…
Yes, ‘suffering’ is not exactly the word for living here. My mama lived in Calgary and sang God Save the Queen when she was 8 years old, and she says the winds were COOOLLLLD.