Birds on a Wire

Wasn't that the name of a rock group?

It rained hard all night and when we walked out our front door this morning the roar of the once bubbling brook immediately got our attention. We walked across the street to look at it, and were in awe of how quickly nature can turn a "wee burn" into a raging brown torrent. Even Ozzie showed no interest in going anywhere near it. Instead we walked up the hill behind our house and watched the birds gather on a power line and the clouds clear, revealing the hills trailing fingers of mist, and the trees and vineyards divested of most of their leaves by the wind. Ozzie had a grand time leaping through the full ditches.

We came home to the discovery that the wind had blown a fair amount of rain under the garage doors and into our boxes of books, rugs , old tools and what the movers refer to as "decor items" . OilMan spent most of the afternoon sorting everything into boxes for the recycle center,  boxes for the charity shop, and boxes of things that might eventually find their way upstairs into the house, once we have shelves and storage places to receive them.

I spent the afternoon unpacking and polishing the ancestral family silver, 4 pickle forks, 2 olive spoons, 5 butter knives, and a number of little bowls  and picks of unknown provenance and usage. I enjoy looking at the cutlery because it bears the initials of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and myself. I rather like the Victorian need to monogram everything in sight and even did it myself when I was a bride.

We had old friends from Sebastopol for dinner and spent a pleasant few hours sharing stories of floods and moving, something they did often and we haven't done in 45 years.

Tomorrow David comes back to put extra shelves in our small supply of kitchen cupboards and fix the leak in the roof over what the previous owners have labeled the "lanai".