Boldly Odd Weather

I'd mentioned yesterday grace working in grotesque ways to meet the requirements of a grotesque world––in Flannery O'Connor––and then I wondered what "grotesque" really means.

"Boldly odd"? I love it!

Etymology of grotesque (adj.):
"wildly formed, of irregular proportions, boldly odd," c. 1600s,  ... from Italian grottesco, literally "of a cave"...

The explanation that the word first was used of paintings found on the walls of Roman ruins revealed by excavation (Italian pittura grottesca) is "intrinsically plausible," according to OED.

Originally merely fanciful and fantastic, the sense became pejorative, "clownishly absurd, uncouth," after mid-18c.

This is a  boldly odd stretch of history here, wouldn't you say?

__________

Quick weather update.
My friend in Texas says he knows about the weather up here from reading my blog, so I have a duty to maintain.

I'm taking the bus to work in half an hour--it's been raining for a couple days now and I am a wuss about biking in the rain.

It's not that hot, but you can see an actual haze of moisture in the air.

After a summer of drought, now we have flash flood warnings, which feels about par for the course. It'd have to rain for days to catch up, so we're still in drought too, but the rain helps.

My southern grandmother, Meribel, and my mother wrote letters to each other their whole lives, and the letters almost always started with a weather report.

Meribel didn't like me––I wasn't ambitious and hardworking like my sister, she preferred my sister.
Once she witnessed me closing a skirt with a safety pin before going to a sixth grade birthday party, and she told that girls who were so sloppy didn't get asked back.

I pointed out that my shirt covered my waistband and no one would know.

But I wish I had some of my grandmother's letters.
Reading Flannery O'Connor's letters reminded me of her, though she was in no way literary, she was of the same world--probably the age of F O'C's mother.
Meribel's letters are mostly parochial news--concerned with her ladies' garden club and her garden and what's happening at Cousin Maud's old place...

She was good at sitting on a porch and chatting through hot afternoons. She did her hard work early in the morning. When you'd visit, she'd stand at the bottom of the stairs about 7 a.m. and clap her hands and call Rise and Shine--I hated it--she'd have been up for hours already. 

She really would fit in a F O'C story--the matron who believes she's in God's good graces because she kept a clean house.
And in her eyes, I would be the foreign, incomprehensible child (boldly odd, without even knowing it).

I'm liking F O'C but her offhand comments on race are painful--accurate reflections of an ugly reality.

Gotta go!