A storm with a history of damaging.

Sometimes I don't pay enough attention to portents. I should know better than this by now, but I don't. Tonight a storm ripped through Gambier--came up from Columbus, the National Weather Service reported, with a history of damaging hail. We had thunder and lightning galore, after an evening of high winds that, I want to believe, are bringing a warm front with them. Already today, in the intervals between downpours, the flowers looked better; the tulips in town are going to make it, I think, and even the newest of the daffodils look as though they'll do all right. Starting to work took considerable effort, but today has been another day of fingers on keys--to produce what Anne Lamott would call a shitty first draft, to be very sure, but to produce, and to produce in a way that has led to some discoveries I did not anticipate: a Henry James story I did not know; a set of notebook entries that will be handy.

But I should perhaps have started packing it in even before the storm hit, and I should certainly have started packing it in before an almost comically disastrous venture to the coffeeshop for a late-night sandwich. But knowing my weaknesses doesn't always keep me from falling into them head-first; I seem to have a penchant for staring my minor ruinations in the face long after there's no storm left, long after the fire has raged through and wrecked its own beauty and left behind it scars and ashes.

At least, I tell myself, I'm the farthest thing from being the only one who should know better. At least what I don't know isn't, as far as I'm aware, damaging anyone else.