Dew Point

There’s something to this sedintary life thing.  It really slows you down and gets you thinking.

I just enjoyed another hand-rolled cigarette on the back deck.  Pedro came out for a moment to check out the scene but quickly retreated to the kitchen to scour the floor for accidental crumb drops.  It raining.  A sign that spring may actually be on its way?

Was it Rodin that said something about searching for the figure contained in the at rock he would chip away?  I can’t remember now.  But I see evidence in this sentiment with each passing day as I slowly smoke American Spirit just beyond the deck doors.

When I moved to Vermont three weeks ago, there was an insurrmountable mound of snow—maybe three feet, maybe more—heaped on the deck, but now, as the rain and sweltering 50 degree heat attacks that mound, as it has been doing since my arrival, new objects are surfacing from the hesitantly melting slush pile.  

First we noticed a mop head.  Then the mop’s full shaft came into view.  Soon there after, another mop shaft showed itself.  A couple nights ago, emerging from the winter rubble, a rug-like object began to appear.  Now, the full swath of preciptation still running its course, we affirmatively identified that object: a bath mat.  How exciting.  More stuff to deck out our already illustrious domicile.

The northfacing portion of the deck has revealed some sort of plasitc patio chair, the hunter green variety that so typifies our local yuppie outdoor furniture trend.  

Other, useless debris too has made itself known.  Bits of plastic from overused trash bins, scrap kindling, and dog doodoo.  The poop bits are most certainly Pedro’s doing.  I tried to kick his waste clumps off the side of the outdoor floor but, with this rain and humidity, I think I likely smeared more into the grain of the wood.  A durable top coat to protect the integrity of the lumber this is.  

One strange climatic oddity has also presented itself.  At first I thought this was our neighbor’s chimney smoke lingering in the vast field behind our house.  Pigpen (he’s a doctor of science now, you know) tells me it’s actually fog.  He says it has something to do with dew.  That is, at a certain temperature the air can only hold so much water.  The water in the air that we can’t see is gasious whlie the rest of it (the water that won’t fit because of the temperature and the already over-saturated air) is water vapor and is the result of the dew point. 

It’s science, he says.  Thank you for that clear, well-articulated lesson, dear. (Real definition of dew point.)

I think I taught this to some of my after school students at the Preschool Academy.  From what I read in the science text book for eight year olds, water vapor is very heavy.  Clouds are water vapor.  They become especially heavy when they collect too much water (a result of the sun heating lakes and rivers and oceans which draws water back into the air an upward toward the sky—a phenomena known as evaporation) and that’s how we get rain.

There is certainly a lot of water vapor going on outside.  I can barely see the trees a hundred and some yards away because of this obtrusive mass of land cloud.  One thing I can see is that spring is a-knockin’.  And I’m sayin’ “Come in, old friend!  Come in!”