Shedding some light...on the vast ocean of my interests

While I sat here, debating whether I should dive into more homework - it's never ending! - or write a blog for this week, since I missed last week (sad face), I decided to spend this half hour before I have to go cook chicken for tonight's dinner recipe...to write a blog post!

And on top of debating whether I should write a blog post now - when I have my shared room in my apt. on campus to myself - or write it after dinner, I was thinking about what I wanted to write about. And then my eye traveled to the latest additions tacked onto the cork board behind my laptop on my desk. Which includes four postcards I got at Sandpiper Restaurant in Door County, WI. Last week Saturday my parents decided to drive up there and check out the fall colors. I brought one of my roommates along and we enjoyed a day of getting off campus. And albeit we didn't find many spectacular fall colors, or even any wooded trails to walk on so I could do what I do best...snap myriad pictures, it was still great to see my parents for a day and like I said before...get off campus. I'm sure you college students who also live on campus can understand. I mean, during the school year it seems like my world shrinks to campus and the grocery store. Exciting right?

Anyway, about my obsession with postcards. Most of the places they boast about in artfully crafted and colorful pictures, I've never actually been too, yet I have them tacked to my desk here at the apt. and also taped to my bedroom walls back home. A lot of them - like the latest four I mentioned earlier - are pictures of lighthouses, most of them in the U.P but some of them in Wisconsin, like the four from Door County. So what's it with you and lighthouses, you may be thinking? Are lighthouses just another offshoot of your obsession with old houses?

Now there may be some truth to that question, because seeing as how most of the postcards I have of lighthouses are those that are historical. But in my defense, who wants a postcard of a new lighthouse? They're ugly. At least with - most anyway - historical lighthouses the houses attached to them actually look like homes. And I guess another reason I found such an interest in them is because just like old houses in general, lighthouses comes in many different shapes and sizes.

Also, my love of lighthouses - which, if I remember correctly, started in late high school, or maybe even after? - may stem from my somewhat baffling dream of living in a ramshackle, weather-beaten and grayed historical cottage on the lip of some crumbling rock facade overlooking a tempest tossed ocean of foaming curses and savagely tossed skirts. In other words, I'd like to find a ramshackle cottage in Maine,  or somewhere in New England where they get those savage "Nor'easter;s". I probably made all of native New England cringe by writing that phrase, did I spell it wrong?

In turn, my love of New England comes from the many historical homes that are amassed there, and also I've always thought New England has some of the best fall foliage around, especially Vermont! Every autumn picture I see of Vermont in Country magazine almost streams off of the glossy page in rich colors and textures. Of course, I'm well aware I might be generalizing about Vermont, or simplifying, whichever word fits better, but I'm sure I found myself plopped down in the middle of some trim, 18th-century Vermont small-town after college with blankets of crisp-smelling leaves falling around me...I wouldn't be complaining!

So why then, you might be asking, do you wish to see such violent weather overcome the sea? And by the way, when I do view one of the legendary "Nor'easter's"I would like to do so in a lighthouse. Of course a historical one! I think it is for the simple fact that I want to hear how the water sounds slashing and gnawing at the rock facade, and how the wind feels galloping around the lighthouse walls, and how the floor shakes with the force of water and wind, two seemingly innocuous elements of the earth converging to split sky and ground, brick and mortar, flesh and bone, calm and night.

Which leads me to yet another offshoot on this ever-expanding tree of my passions...severe weather. Now after reading that bit about me wanting to witness a black-soul storm churning low over some far-flung waters you might be thinking...there's no surprise! Not only do I wish to witness an ocean chomping at the bit, but I also more than any other force of nature, wish to see a tornado in person. But not just a tornado, mind you, I want to also see an innocent thunderstorm move slow over the Oklahoma plains and build ominously and deliberately into a famed supercell. I want to feel the apprehension build in the air while it lays lifeless like a thin draping of skin against a starving stray dog. I want to hear the crowding silence that comes to pack close to your skin just before a tornado churns from the sky. Branching from my love for photography, I'd like to travel along with a storm chasing team and photograph severe weather...specifically tornadoes and lightning. Capturing lightning on film - satisfactorily of course! - has been a dream of mine since I can remember! As has seeing a tornado in person.

Of course, I'm well aware that when that day comes - and I'm certain it will! - I'll be terrified. After all, tornadoes aren't to be taken lightly. Just as when lightning slithers down from those wispy-edged black and gray clouds, splitting a burning path to the ground, I'll feel my skin crawl and something deep inside me clamor against my skull, itching to run away, to turn towards common sense instead of edging further out towards the cockeyed lip of reason trembling with a soft cackle and a focused stare that in fact stares nowhere. After all, as further proof that these dreams of mine haven't stemmed from various books and novels I've read over the years - albeit, that's probably the inadvertent case in some of them! - I can mention the first ever novella I wrote in middle school entitled "Eye of the Storm".

It involved a main character, Cassandra, her sister Holley, and their father, whose name I can't remember, and a violent thunderstorm - and ensuing tornado -  that tears their world apart. And aside from the fact that I based the story in Wyoming near the mountains - I know, I know, I can hear you laughing! - and that even after four or five notebooks filled I never actually got to the whole storm thing, that unfinished novella proves that even in middle school I was writing about rural life and tornadoes. So why stray from it now?

But Corrina, you might be asking, why translate such passions to your real life? Why not leave your characters to race towards that tornado? Or move into that dilapidated Victorian a stone's throw from the town limit to nowhere? Because, just as I've always known I should write about rural life, tornadoes, old houses, troubled pasts and the occasional murder/supernatural mystery...I know that with each character I create they reflect a larger part of me that I can't bring to the surface...well, at least I haven't been able to yet. Some day when I'm photographing that black-throated tornado, or wrapping myself in blankets while I watch the stealthy winter wind slip between the cracks in that old two-over-two window in my ramshackle historic house, I might catch a glimpse of one my characters, ambling along, and think...finally, I have the life they have, the life I dream about, the life that at one point I could find only through words, words like this, and through stories that started a decade ago, dreams that found life through my imagination, but had really started in my heart.