Playing Fair and Being Kind

I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE…

Or, somebody call the cops. Things are out of control!

My look-off point, that place toward which I stare to visualize what it is I want to express later, is just about West-North-West and about thirty degrees elevation. From my seat in The Castle, it is out the top half of the northerly picture window. That should give you a good idea of what I am looking at. Mostly tree tops and blueish sky. Whilst staring out-of-focus in that direction, I sometimes get distracted by a thing crawling across the blueish sky and well beyond the tree tops. A horizontal white stripe is scoring the panorama, right to left. Right to left in this case is from the Northeast toward the Southwest. On Thursdays the lines are multiples. That is to say, there are more than one visible in my field of vision at any one time. All going in the same direction. My initial reaction was mild surprise and it has remained so for nearly 35 years of sitting in this same spot day after day. What you have just read must indicate my sluggishness. Don’t believe it. I am very fit and active. I fact, I teach gymnastics and break dancing. So, lose that thought. I’m fit as a fiddle.

Here it is a few months after noticing these white lines crossing my field of vision from Northeast toward the Southwest and I am slightly more than mildly surprised. First of all, if these are unaccountable flights of jet propulsion aircraft, they just might be the Ruskies heading for New York City. The mushroom cloud brigade if you know what I mean. Alternately, they could be American U2’s escaping from Reykjavik, Iceland. You just don’t know. I’ve been told that these high-flying birds are more than vapor trails or contrails. Some in the business of nervously tracking such things claim these dupes are quietly seeding the atmosphere. Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering. That worries me as much as the possibility that a Russian pilot is on a training mission. After a few hours of watching the white stipes moving along the skies tend to turn less royal blue and shade toward a paler hue. (There goes another one. Closer over head but in the same direction.)

A few minutes ago, I heard a low grumbling noise, loud enough to cause low frequency vibrations in The Castle. I thought it was one of the town trucks rolling by on a mission of seasonal importance, such as running a cleaning implement to pick up the grit left over from sanding the roads on snow days. I stood to look to see if I could identify the source of the noise. The only thing I saw was Dottie Gregory slowly driving past in her SAAB convertible, heading for her house I suspect. Dottie must have a bad bearing in the SAAB motor, I thought. Or else she has wheel bearing coming apart. It was pretty loud. I stepped outside later and was enjoying the sun’s rays on the deck and I heard that loud noise again but this time it seemed to be coming from above. I couldn’t see past the roof line of The Castle so I had to reposition myself. I saw flying over a small version of a Sikorsky Seahorse. It was a bright yellow; therefore, I knew it was not military. It grumbled along toward Brunswick or maybe Bath and went on out of sight and sound.

Back inside now. As I write this, I’m observing three white trails in the sky and two of them look like they might converge. That would be a tragedy. I watched these two and an additional third more to the suth’erd. The sky was rapidly filling up with aircraft slicing their way toward the southwest. I can hear that helicopter again so I rise up to look out the northerly picture window and by gawd there is a town truck towing a street sweeping machine behind it. I think I’m going daft by now. I have to apologize to Dottie for thinking her car was crap. I can’t square the Seahorse and the town truck sound-alikes. Baffling is filling my exciting life to a point of overflowing.

Well, I see the geoengineering has done its job. The sky is now getting silvery-blue. I suspect the temps will drop a bit and then more clouds will form in the west which in turn will bring some cooling as well as precipitation. I don’t see any flying or grumbling objects in the vicinity so this might be the end of the chaos for the day.

I hope you all are doing well and that Spring is in your neck of the woods. I’ve planted three rows of greens; kale and swiss chard. Yesterday I saw a sprout in a tray of potting soil with morning glory seeds buried. Seed potatoes will arrive today. I should go and dig up the bed where I intend for them to go.

Try to stay out of trouble but also enjoy yourself.

G. M. Goodwin
9 May 2019