White Horses On The Bay

Force 10: 48 - 55 Knots - Storm

Force 10:  48-55 Knots

Storm

Very high waves with long, overhanging crests. The resulting foam in great patches is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. On the whole, the surface of the sea takes on a white appearance.  The tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like. Visibility is affected.       

    The north wind blowing up the harbour all morning kept the spring fog at bay and invigorated Fisher as he went about his Thursday chores. He thought of Jenny nearly every minute as he worked on the grounds surrounding St. Peter’s, tidying up as best he could for Georgina Stirling’s monument dedication.  The sudden gusts made the job more difficult, yet he didn’t mind.  He felt giddy, enthusiastic, like he’d started a brand new job and everything was finally going his way.  His concentration on each task competed with near obsessive thoughts of the night before, when he’d made love to Jenny at the Inn. His workday flew by in a series of daydreams and a steady stream of accomplishments no one would even notice come Sunday.

 As more snow disappeared each day, a new layer of flotsam revealed itself. There were candy wrappers and cigarette tinfoil, bent bottle caps, and other refuse from a winter’s worth of church gatherings.  Fisher usually found the spring cleaning interesting, like an archeological dig with stories attached to the things he picked up. It seemed to Fisher that people dropped bits and pieces of their lives like they were leaving trails of evidence, proof they were here on this earth.  There were yellowed church pamphlets, baptism cards, funeral programs, the odd wedding invitation, and bake sale flyers strewn about the yard like fading archives of this particular parish. 

    He was amazed at how much garbage accumulated over the course of one winter.  Some of it had blown onto the property in the winter’s gales; waste paper from the corner store down the street, receipts from the gas station across the road, and sometimes personal notes torn from the clutched hands of passengers on the ships at sea. Those were interesting when the writing was still legible.

     Fisher eagerly gathered up the bits of junk snagged on the fence slats and plastered to the base of the church, and each piece of garbage removed felt like he was lifting a small burden from the earth’s surface, it made him feel useful in an important albeit, unsung way. 

    At the end of his workdays he would stand back and marvel at how clean and tidy the grounds had become through the efforts of no one else but him.  How the perfectly white church rose out of the neat tufts of grass and looked so crisp and clean against the de-cluttered landscape.  He was able to erase the carelessness and disrespect of others and make the church and it’s grounds presentable, sacred again, at least until the wind picked up.

    It was mindless work, but Fisher welcomed the chance to make things better, return the church grounds to a pristine condition, however temporary it might be.  Tidying was almost a compulsion for him that extended beyond his job and into his personal life.  Wherever Fisher went, a piece of trash on the ground, a fence post leaning over, or something else amiss, he felt compelled to pick it up, fix it, or correct the mistake.  The more little problems he could solve in his life, the more he could avoid the big ones.

       It was almost 4:30 when he figured Jenny was not going to show up at the church as planned.   He decided she was probably caught up in her work and would just meet him at his house, so he began his short walk home, eager to see her again.  As he passed by the house a few doors up from his, he noticed the old couple that had lived there for as long as he could remember, wandering around their front yard. They had their thick sweaters and wool caps on, but still they seemed to be dipping their toes in the unusual warmth of the late afternoon.  Their movements were cautious as they poked around the perimeters of their picket-fenced yard together. No doubt, they were surveying the damage left behind from another the long cold winter, determining where to begin the annual sprucing up of their simple lives.