Starting the day

The sunny Caribbean drips with rain, echoing with thunder up and down the sodden, sullen, sky. The yard is ankle deep or deeper where water will not drain and the street lights shine, still on, as morning is not bright enough to trip their sensors. I look south in search of blue. A gentle sign that roads there might be passable. Modern times have changed the land and water gathers, pools and blocks the way instead of running off to reservoirs or to the sea.

Ah, progress! So sweet a word to greedy pockets without a thought to consequence or future! Let's build a stadium right on the edge of town, impeding traffic, shortening tempers every game, road rage the brand new feature of the year! Let's spend $150 million for a fleeting month of cricket, world cup where no one came particularly to see the game.

The local ladies of the night complained that their investments in new clothes all went to waste. Business was not good. And all the houses hastily thrown up, lives mortgaged for the big killing in high occupancy stakes...for naught. The hotels themselves sat empty and the cruise ships sold ten day cruises for less than US$100 - my friends all cruised up and down the islands for a week or more; I would have joined them but duty called and I was just back from New York so I fed the fish and cat.

The shades of grey are shifting, now more steel than charcoal; perhaps a touch of pearl, all luminous, in places as the storm rolls further north and onward out to sea. A tropical depression, perhaps a wave of weather passing through in noisy squalls, pissing on the world with great disdain. A comment on our petty, pointless peevish bickering? I doubt it. Why should the weather care?

Too bad the storm has passed so completely. I'll have to go to work.