It's 9AM

Would That it Were

Nov 01, 2023

The storm came rolling over the edge of the hill just after noon on Sunday.

The rain fell in thick sheets, tinting the sky a dull gray and turning the slopes into tiny raging rivulets, torrents that twisted and fought to the lakeshore below.

The water was a coffee with cream colored waterfall, leaking into the lake at the corner of the boatramp.

Horace Freeman stood at the edge of his newly constructed deck and ignored the torrential downpour.

Afternoon thunderstorms were common in the hot days of summer. It saved him watering the grass, and kept the lake peaceful.

His definition of peaceful was free of the boats that crisscrossed the channel, and roared around the point he called home.

He was an average man, medium height, slight build with a small paunch tugging at his waistline. His eyes were as gray as the stormy skies and flashed each time lightening cracked the horizon.

He stared across the narrow cove he had lived on for thirty seven years. He glared at the hill across the way, a hill freshly shorn of thick pine trees that once stretched from the seawall to the top of the ridge.

Now, they were gone.

A bulldozer came in on a Thursday afternoon and ripped them over sideways, shoved them into a big pile at the edge of the lake.

Horace had been to the store, and it was all finished by the time he got home. Otherwise, he might have shot the man with the .22 rifle he kept by the door to kill snakes.

“Progress,” he muttered under his breath and spit on the rain soaked ground below the deck.

Thunder rumbled prophetically and he hunched his shoulders.

The rain cut into the hillside, tearing the exposed land into gully’s, the natural cover gone, piled to one side of the clearing.

Dirt, bits of brush, litter from the construction site washed down the hill and into his cove. The worker’s wouldn’t pick up after themselves.

“Serves them right,” he said, waiting for the thunder to follow. None came.

Concrete foundations nestled in the muddy ridge, like unbleached bones of a dinosaur. The rain washed away the dirt around the edges, carrying it into the lake water.

Horace toyed with the idea of sabotage, an almost ancient memory from his stint in the Army surfacing like the foundation.

He could make it look natural, with the storm, he surmised. It would be a simple act, taking just a few moments to set up and execute.

He looked up one way on his side of the lake, then down the other. Six houses now. Once, when he first bought the point, his was the only one.

“Too many potential eyes,” he said. “Better wait till dark.”

Even as he said it, he knew the moment was gone. The anger was still there, but muted, resigned. The raw ache crying for action, for justice, for retribution was gone. His anguished soul moaned, but his mind, his body wouldn’t listen.

He settled in a folding chair on the edge of his new deck. Horace Freeman watched the rain wash away the world, and waited for the storm to pass.

Storm watching And a Coke.

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