Blue Rain

After a long bout of hot, sunny days, it started to rain two days ago, bringing in the clouds, humidity and cooler temperatures. The light changes, and that is why I am glad we have an abundance of brightly colored flowers, like our fuchsia and our large Morning Glory. The Morning Glory come mostly in 5 inches across white blooms with a hint of pale blue in a star pattern across their lovely large trumpets. One stood out this morning, a 5 inch Morning Glory of an almost neon lavender blue hue, that just took my breath away. Somehow, the sight of this gorgeous flower amid  eight white same sized Morning Glory triggered a melancholic memory. The reading in middle school of Paul Verlaine's poem " Il pleut sur mon coeur  comme il pleut sur les toits". The poem made me very sad when I read it the firs time at age 14, and now, all these years later, I am reminded of this same poem and it makes me equally sad. At the same age I read for the first time Arthur Rimbaud's " Le dormeur du val", written in 1870. It is an enchanting poem about a young dead soldier shot in an open field. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud were stormy lovers around that time, but of course we were not told that in our Catholic girl school. Perhaps intuitively I perceived both these poets had deep knowledge of the depths of despair love can experience, because those two poems haunt me to this day. So, here I am, at 56, looking at my electric blue Morning Glory, looking both special and lost among its white robed fellow flowers, and the melancholy of the 14 year old school girl comes back, like a wound that never healed properly. Perhaps the fact that I feel my isolation more acutely these last weeks as I wonder what happened to a friend of mine who seems to have dropped off the planet, adds to the jolt I felt. Instead of Marcel Proust's " A la recherche du Temps Perdu", with my soul and heart it seems to be " A la Recherche du Cle Perdu", le cle qui me permetterait de retrouver le chemin de retour aux amities perdues. Enfin, voila mon histoire de perte totale. C'est beau, quand -meme, les fleurs. Got to love those gorgeous Morning Glory, especially that blue one. My, my, what a beauty on a rainy, humid day. " Il y a deux trous rouges au cote droit."