Brown #27

The pool hit 78 degrees today, and we celebrated this by going swimming. Seventy-eight is still just a tad cool, but vurra vurra refreshing. But anyway, we were swimming away (actually, I was throwing a rock and then diving to find it) when we became dimly aware that a storm seemed to be coming in.

I am nearsighted and swim without my glasses, so the best I could tell was that it was getting darkish to the east, on the far side of the house, and that the wind was coming up dust storm fashion. Having had prior run-ins with dust storms, we got out of the pool to batten down the hatches - cover the haystack with a tarp, bring the horses in, close the garage door, bring the lawn furniture in, weight the garbage can with a piece of sawed-off railroad track, that sort of thing.

By the time I had my sandals and shirt on, the dust was upon us, great opaque sheets of it pouring off the land to the east, the well drilling rig off to the east groaning and slapping in the wind. I remind you that I was soaking wet. I further remind you that I'm now standing in air that is quite dense with dust. Within a matter of moments I resembled James Mason in "The Desert Fox", and was far too dusty to go back into the pool after the blow was over. I had a fine coating of mud.

And now I have a headache, so whatever my point was, I no longer care.