May 12
When I got out of bed in the morning I looked at the birdfeeder again (which was now hung between two ropes) and kept my rump away from the bed, because Aric had already spent enough time under my tail.
Aric leaned up on his elbow and asked me if I was thinking of flying down there and taking some more of the seeds and I told him that maybe I was because he had deliberately tempted me by putting sunflower seeds in there and he said the birds loved them and I said so do ponies.
He thought that was really funny, and I asked him if he'd ever tried sunflower seeds before and he thought that was even funnier.
When he was done laughing he told me that you could buy bags of just sunflower seeds and you could get them with the shell on or off, whichever you preferred. So then I felt a little bit silly about taking them out of the birdfeeder.
I asked him if he'd put up the ropes to keep the squirrel out, and he said that he had, and I told him that it wasn't working. Squirrels are really clever.
He got up and stood beside me and watched the squirrel eating out of the birdfeeder and then he picked up a shoe and opened the window and threw the shoe at the squirrel which made it run off but it came back pretty quickly. Then he told me to go talk to the squirrel and tell it to leave and I said that I couldn't talk to them, I just knew what they were like.
I suppose I could have maybe tried to find a hawk and get it to follow me until it saw the squirrel but that would have been a lot of effort and probably wouldn't have worked anyway, unless I convinced the hawk to live on Aric's roof. And if I did, none of the other birds would want to use the feeder, so that really wasn't a good solution at all.
I said that he ought to just let the squirrels have what they want, or else put up a separate feeder for them so they leave the ones for the birds alone, and he said that he didn't really want to encourage them but unless he could find some way to hang the birdfeeder that they couldn't get at it he wasn't going to have much of a choice.
I just flew over Kalamazoo but I kept low, below the tops of the tall buildings, so that the airplane directors didn't have to worry about me. Dori was on the radio and she was as cheerful as always.
When I was back at my room, I checked my computer mailbox and I had gotten a letter from Mister Salvatore saying that I could take the test on Friday if I wanted to schedule it and that was going to be tight because there was a play but if I went right after Anthropology class, I could make it work. So I let him know and then I went to breakfast.
I spent the morning working on a couple more dreamcatchers and reading more of the Bible, and then at lunch both Cedric and Leon were doing last-minute studying for their class so they weren’t in the mood for any conversation, which was too bad.
But then right at the end of dinner Cedric leaned over and hugged me. He said it was for luck, and then I asked Leon if he wanted a hug for luck, too, and he pretended like he didn’t but he really did.
When I went outside after lunch I could feel the weather changing—there was a heavy, pregnant feel to the air, so I excused myself for a moment and flew up until I could see over all the trees and I could just make out some building clouds off in the distance, so I was a bit antsy when I went into class.
Conrad asked if anyone in the class still had exams coming up, and only two people raised their hands, so he said that he was going to introduce us to a slightly newer poet called Cate Marvin. He started off by reading us a poem called Landscape Without You, which I sort of didn’t understand because a lot of it was about new things that I haven’t grown up with like shingle roofs instead of thatch or shake. I guess they wear out and leak and have to be fixed, just like the seams on a ship. There was a protected sandy inlet not too far from town and sometimes sailors would run their boats aground at high tide and then rig ropes to pull it over on one side or the other as the tide went out and then they’d scrape barnacles off and fix the seams, and when the tide came back in, re-float their boat.
He had us read Flowers, Always next, which was about Miss Marvin looking for an Always and not finding one, and then she was sad because she understood that there never was an Always. I don’t think she should be sad, though—I think it’s better that there isn’t an Always. I think it’s better that it’s always a Sometimes.
Then he finished by having us read Dead Girl Gang Bang and that was not a very cheerful way to end the class.
Outside it was raining but not too much, and the wind was gusting worse than it had been, and kind of gusting and shifting around uncertainly and the sunlight was a little bit muted, so I knew that there would be more of a storm coming in pretty soon.
When I got back to my dorm room my telephone was blinking and there was a message from Mel saying that storms were predicted to come in and did I want to go out and observe them then there was another more recent message saying that they'd revised the forecast and that they might be here as soon as four or maybe sooner.
That didn't leave me with a lot of time to meet up with him, so I grabbed all my equipment really quickly and made sure to take my telephone too. I wouldn't be able to get out there in time by wing, so I begged Peggy to take me and she said that she hated driving in bad weather but she would just for me and I hugged her and then we hurried out to Cobalt.
I tried giving her directions but I wasn't very good at it and she finally took my telephone away from me when we were sitting at a light and tapped at the screen a little bit and pretty soon a woman's voice from my telephone was telling her where to go.
She got onto the 94 Highway and took it west until the Mattewan exit and neither of us saw him at first so we were going to go to a gas station and then we saw his truck in a parking lot right next to the highway. It was parked across several spaces so that the nose was pointed southwest which is where the storm was coming from.
Peggy had to help me put on my flight gear because it was really difficult inside Cobalt and then I got out and knocked on Mel's window and he rolled it down and gave me the latest update. The cab of his truck had a bunch of different radios inside and also a folding computer which was showing radar pictures.
He asked me if I wanted to go up and get a feel for the clouds and maybe see if I had a better view of any trouble spots and I told him that I would love to, so I radioed for clearance and got it after a minute or so, then I flew up and called to him on the CB radio to make sure that we had good contact with each other, then got more altitude until I was kind of in the thick of it.
This was what I was made for; this was what I loved. The wind was gusting around and rain was spitting down on me and off in the distance the clouds looked nasty and that was just the kind of thing that our weather team lived for. If the other mares had been with me, we would have flown out there and knocked down the storm, but they weren't. It was just me and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I kept a running report of what I saw until the storm cells passed us by, and then the sky got a little bit lighter and the wind dropped down and the rain lightened and I could see and feel that the worst of it had passed us by but just to be sure I got permission to fly up higher and went right up into the clouds just a little bit then came back down.
There had been so much energy in the sky that my hooves sparked right before I landed and I got another little shock when I touched the door on Mel's truck but after that it was gone. He said I'd done a real good job and that made me proud. Maybe here on Earth I can't fight the storms like I could in Equestria but at least I can let people know that they're coming.
When I got back in Cobalt all soaking wet, Peggy hugged me and said that it had been a little scary on the ground to see the trees whipping back and forth and that for a while when it was really intense she had lost sight of me and she had been so relieved when the rain lightened up and she saw my blinking light again.
Then when we were driving back she asked me if that kind of thing was really what I did in Equestria, and I said that I got closer and my team helped to break up the storms and sometimes we also patrolled for ships in weather like that or worse and she just shook her head and concentrated on the road.
Of course I'd missed dinner, and so had Peggy, so I treated her to a meal at Steak 'n Shake and I told her I was sorry that I had gotten Cobalt's seat all wet. She said that was okay, she never rode on that side anyways.
I was still pretty damp when I went over to Meghan's, so she put a towel down on the bed for me and I told her all about my day and then she got curious about how it had been back in Equestria, so I started telling her about some of the storms I'd seen.
Pretty soon Lisa came over and she asked if we'd started the movie yet and Meghan said that I was talking about weather work and it was really interesting, so Lisa wound up sitting on the bed with me and I just naturally switched to Equestrian because it was a lot easier to describe that way. And it didn't take too long before they were talking in Equestrian, too.
I guess we were kind of louder than we should have been, because a little bit after that Becky came over and she said that she thought we were going to watch a movie, but I was in the middle of a story and at least wanted to finish that first, and then it wound up that I spent all evening talking about my weather team and life on the ocean and I don't think any of us were sorry that we didn't see the movie.
It was pretty late when Lisa and Becky finally went back to their room, and Meghan locked the door between their rooms and then got undressed except for her panties and then she got in bed with me. I snuggled up with my head on her breast and she petted my mane and then rested her hand on my shoulder and drifted off to sleep.