Soggy Words

There is a thirst here in this rescued desert, a water table wanting. Folks are doing rain-dances. Whatever happened to seeding clouds? I suppose we've already messed too much with Mother Nature. 

Now a downpour has come. The sky let it go yesterday in torrents. Our sliding glass door leaked. We collected drips in a bucket and spread towels on the carpet. All this for fifteen minutes and then the sun returned.

The red wave became a ripple but let's not go there. 

When I become mayor of the planet I shall decree rain nightly between midnight and five. All right, go ahead on designated days. Rain on picnics. Call off the ball game. Wake-up windshield wipers. I want to see kids floating popsicle-sticks down the gutter-rivers, umbrellas blooming like peonies, Gene Kelly splashing in puddles. I'm remembering you Ethel Waters, Gale Storm and Claude Rains?  Rain on my parade. 

I recall, fondly, the trips Peggy and I took when it rained. There was a deluge that day in Delft and roofs had a glisten to them seen from across the water where Vermeer stands in our memory on the cobbles of the town square. He had a palette of tulips covered with drops congealed like pearl earrings. In the field cows chewed wet grass, their cud going to milk and back to that pitcher he caught the maid pouring as if from her breast.

Because of rain we stole a kiss or two.

The cloudy day gave way to skies of blue.

We must thank that moisty, misty window pane.

We found our love because of rain.           

          (Composer, Ruth Poll, lyricist Les Baxter)

It also rained in that seaside town we’ll never forget whose name we can never remember. We watched from our window the Atlantic churning against rocks going to pebbles going to sand. In the aftermath we walked under a wheel of gulls and a carbonated night sky spreading an enormous calm on the beach. Waves found their own insistent music.  We took that rhythm inside, our own turbulence going from Beethoven’s Ode to a Chopin adagio.

Albany rain torrential and relentless in its spillage turned streets to gullies and dips in the road to tubs as we sloshed our way into the restaurant, sat by the fire celebrating our willingness to be lucky and how we ended each other’s drought, lives like plants parched then quenched.

Now I am thinking Hiroshige wood-block prints of fine rain, a canvas of verticals and bodies under parasols running for shelter. I’m imagining snow falling on cedar and a blizzard of petals from cherry trees. Landscapes of white rolling hills. Let it cover the Sierras with drifts as wide as a blank page and now let it slip-slide away.

I started writing this two days ago under a partial sun and when I finished the streets were wet. I’m prepared to take credit for a fraction of an inch.