Driven out of her house by connectivity problems (a virus?), UD’s in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel on the Rockville Pike, her teeny Aspire balanced on her knees. Outside, yet another stormy evening.

A line of Barwood cabs waits along the circular hotel driveway; beyond them and up eighteen floors, there’s my aunt’s condominium with its views of the Montgomery County Aquatic Center, and, on clear days, Sugarloaf Mountain.

Like my mother when she was alive, my aunt refuses to learn how to use a computer. She refuses to touch a computer.

I remember how hard my niece — University Diaries’ blog mistress — tried to get my mother on board. She installed a computer in an office across from my mother’s bedroom and taped a big piece of paper saying PUSH THIS BUTTON TO TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER – I think I even recall an arrow pointing directly to the spot – next to the start button. She showed her how easily she could access gardening sites and English Cocker Spaniel sites. But nothing worked. She wasn’t having any. Neither is her sister, my aunt.

So even if I’d wanted to go to my aunt’s luxury condo and sit in one of its big rooms and gaze at the Aquatic Center and use one of her computers, I can’t. No computers. And it’s a pity, because, like me, my aunt writes poetry — she’s been at for it decades, and has an impressive body of work — and I’d love to exchange poems and comments with her online. I’ve mentioned it to her more than once. Nothing doing.

Here in the lobby it’s all about muted tans and whites – a calming color scheme, and UD can use some calming after hours of struggle to connect various computers in her house.

UD is not emotionally complicated. She has two gears: Happy and Angry. She’s mainly happy, and when happy moves through existence looking and acting roughly like everyone else. (Not quite, but pretty much.)

When angry, UD, who never inherited the Repression Gene, storms. She storms like one possessed. Her storms are rarely directed at others; they’re private rages.

When truly cyclonic conditions pertain, as they eventually did tonight after hours of frustration with computers, she turns on the kitchen radio to 1003 FM, the oldies station, and dances and sings with great violence to whatever shake it baby thing is on. Her dog, stationed near the kitchen table in case someone comes in for a snack, gazes at her. Her husband peeks in, laughs, calls her a fool, and goes off to read a good book.

On the drive over here, UD was eloquent: “I come from a land where the sun always shines. In that land, my house had a hot spot and the hot spot was always hot. My heart yearns to go back to Key West. But I must live in this land, where it rains every day and is so dark that we leave our outside light on all afternoon. For two weeks, I’ve been back in this land, where the computers don’t connect, and where I must take to the roads during dark storms in search of a hot spot. Where I must blog among strangers and flat screen tvs.”