I have begun rereading Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novel series for the third time, this time aloud. I found the jargon and exposition early in Master and Commander hard going aloud, but we have moved on from there to familiarity with some details and absolute acceptance of the rest. My husband laughs at every bit of wit so we are having a fine time and sailing right through. (I began reading three days ago and we are already past three quarters through.) I try to stifle my impulse to explain what will eventually become clear in a next few pages or a few books. O’Brian builds tension and action wonderfully.

(I have spent too many hours in despair and crying of late. Lucky to be alive. Yes. But these are not proud times for my country.)

Perhaps O’Brian is one reason I thought about the wind so specifically during our walk this morning. Yesterday, we walked for two and a half hours, and then about another half hour later on. This morning we meant to have a short walk, but stayed out the better part of an hour, despite the stiff wind. It rained on us yesterday, but we really did not mind. Today over the ocean were blue skies, the moon still showing more than a half even as the time neared nine o’clock. Wind out of the south, gusting and sometimes holding at a light gale.

Dry sand blows over the top of wet sand, sometimes gathering they way snow will, though snow is very rare on our coast. I recall our Sequoyah, an Afghan Hound of considerable strength and sweetness, who did not like the sand piling on his toes when I walked him on a windy beach. He would pick up each forefoot in turn and shake the sand out of it, then dancing on the shore like a dressage horse. (I do miss the dogs painfully.)

We have over the years been possessed of two wind gauges—one belonged to my step-grandmother who left me the house. It was carried away during a great storm while we were in Arizona (with Sequoyah at dog shows, as it happens). The next gauge was also carried away during a storm. We were accustomed to steady winds of 45mph or more, gusts of 65 or even 70mph during an ordinary storm. A really bad wind coming from the west would bow the glass in our ocean-facing windows. It was a disconcerting sight, and the reason I was always grateful to have some sort of curtain or blind to lower against such blows.

We have had no wind gauge at all for years now, and though we can check with Cannon Beach for windspeed, because they are a larger community, we almost never do. We can feel it.

The last really impressive storm was 2 December 2007, the day a window facing the ocean blew out and I fixed in back in and wired it in place as best I could because Gary was still drugged from hernia surgery two days before. We were without power Sunday to Friday. It was dark and wet and boring that time of year with so few hours of daylight and inadequate lanterns.

The local public radio station reminded us every hour on the hour about a tree falling on their roof and never provided a speck of news about our end of the county. (I have never quite forgiven the necessity of driving to Cannon Beach in order to buy a Portland paper in order to find out what was going on.) We were warm enough with our wood stove which I cooked on. I’d made a large casserole of eggplant parmesan and we put thawing strawberries in oatmeal for lovely breakfasts, and experimented with various methods of grinding coffee beans—smashing with hammers and rolling with rolling pins—to fill the french press. It was a challenging week, but not a bad one. Rather fun, to tell the truth, though I was grateful to have hot water again by Friday night.

It was also the year my mother died, the year I graduated from my MFA program,the year our younger son married, and the beginning of the first of my still non-writing periods. I was mourning. I lost all humor from my writing, and my stories often were humorous until then.

And here, the day has worn on while I return to this posting, adding to my story and watching the weather change outside my window. The sky was clear aqua during most of our windy walk, then rain again (it rained last night off and on), and now the pale blue sky is flying overhead again.

O’Brian reminds me how one disappointment or embarrassment can dredge up a range of others long thought put to bed. There was a tide earlier this spring that cast up hundreds of crabs on shore—huge Dungeness crabs, and all male. A knowledgeable friend explained that they were likely scraped up from very deep water where they had lain for some time.

There is work to be done.

I have knitting to attend to and a partial knitting project to unravel and begin again, cards to send my grandchildren, and I am rethinking my plans for National Novel Writing Month. Last year I had intended to work on a series of short stories. I think that might be a good choice for this year. A baker’s dozen, aiming for 60k words, perhaps. So long as I write 50k of new words meant for a single book, I think that will answer.

I have already met my “writing goal” for the year of 100 rejections. Mostly because of 65 agent queries, it easily met that target a couple of weeks ago. I will not order new lamps, but move around the ones I have. I have been trying to send back the darned desk and hope to have it gone within a fortnight (finally!). I rearranged the living room sofa downstairs, shifted the one upstairs, and I will continue desk using a set-up that is imperfect but has done duty.

That is, I am rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (if you know the saying?) and will muddle along. That is often the way when terrible forces are at work destroying the world. The ocean is white with foam from heavy surf, though not so loud at the other morning when it seemed to be deliberately cracking on.

In a day or two, at most, we will begin the next book in this series. When we have read the twenty volumes on my shelves, I will go hunting for number 21.

*Yes, that is the preferred spelling.