She said,
You don’t want
to get on the dirty side
of a hurricane
because that’s what
kills people.
And that became
a central metaphor
for our relationship.
Don’t get on my dirty side,
she’d say, or I’ll mess you up.
Or I’d say,
The dirty side is moving in,
so you better back off.
And we always talked like that,
the way people talk about the weather,
but we never did anything about it.
(“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”–Mark Twain or possibly Charles Dudley Warner)
Oh, Good Lord, y’all, I thank we better git in the house. That sky is darker than Brother Jimmy’s sermon last Sunday, and it’s flashing like a God-damned disco. It’s gonna be a gully washer, all right, but Ronnie’s got the big truck if we git in any trouble, and we can surely trust Jesus will be with us. The last time we had a toad strangler like this, a big ol’ twister turned Alma’s roof inta toothpicks.