A Cape May address, your new one I guess.

I felt the earth move under my feet. I felt the sky tumbling down. As Rayanne Graff would have said, it was a time. And incidentally, it all started with a haircut.



We snaked through the flats of Oyster Creek at a drift lest our wake finish off what the earthquake started. Dilapidated shacks perched lopsided on stilts atop the still water, rendered more lopsided still not an hour before. His first impulse when it all happened was to head for the open water, and eagerly we followed, until we found ourselves invading this foreign country, cowering under the angry glare of the seagulls keeping sentinel. On the bay the wind was fierce but here the air was disturbed only by the wings of a thousand greenheads; every inch we gained cost another painful welt on arms, legs, neck. All for nothing.

Back on the bay the engine stalled out and we were left adrift....



Home again and there was much and more to clean up, to sweep up and shore up and make up. And that right there is the meat of my adult life; whether physical or intangible, I've been a worker bee buzzing about my hive, tending to my colony and buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, waiting in line at the grocery store to buy the last loaf of bread in the city, searching in vain for a lantern by which to play Yahtzee, tying and severing knots. And when the storm came all was quiet but for the steady drip drip drip of rain drops in my living room.



Sunday morning I awoke to the sounds of trumpets and tubas and trombones, my stomach in knots, my hair matted and tangled from the 50-mph winds.The sun was bright and the leaves were shaking in their trees, and I was positively crushed by the weight of it all.



A week later and I still can't get my hair to lay right.