What is it about a rainstorm that draws me out the front door onto the porch to watch it wash down? It pelts the road like buckshot, gathering, rivering, heeding gravity into streams and pools. Everything glistens and moves and shakes under the life-giving assault. It pours off of the roof, down gutters and spouts, cascading through chains, into barrels, into the newly breathing spring earth where roots wait and stir. The yard goes from brown to green in two days. The bowling alley roof, flat and pitched to drain at one corner, pours a small Niagra spout – relentless, prodigious, wasteful – splattering onto oily, gritty pavement. Criminy, what you could do with a cistern there!
All night it pours and drizzles and mists. We leave the window open to the dripping, the soft splash, the porous, waiting earth receiving. Simply receiving.
This morning, Easter, that most pagan day, that most pagan of passages, we sit together outside by a fire of sage and prunings from our yard. It is still dripping. The mountains are clothed in mist. Yellow flames, candles, bread, colored eggs. The chickadees we think are nesting in the crab-apple tree out front call. A robin, pedestrian and robust as ever. The resident mallard waddles toward the birdfeeder where it picks through scattered seeds. We sit together in the quiet drizzle and talk of cycles, rhythms – the moon, the water, the tides, the seasons, birth and death and every breath, in and out. Around us, the rain continues, the earth opens to it, accepting, drinking, coming alive.