Witness

Rain after dark

 Waking early,  the sound of rain cohering with the dark, I send a message of gratitude for this gift from the skies to my hardened ground, and then begin to scan, mentally, the yard, wondering what might have been left out in it: the car windows open or some cushion soaking?  Not from worry, exactly...just a habitual sense of where things are at this moment, of pulling in or taking out, if necessary.

Or so I think.  I do remember a newly opened bag of organic soil behind the new Empress of China dogwood I brought home last week (a gentle trade for all those trees that died in summer) and put in a large pot on the far side of the yard to await its final planting by some as yet unnamed gardener, as it is too big for me to dig in myself.  It's a lovely tree, with hundreds of tiny buds between elongated leaves...not the dogwood one usually sees...promising to ripen into lots of small flowers in a yard like mine, partial shade to a few hours of sun.  I fervently wish it well.

Empress of China dogwood (at garden center)

So I get up, put on my raincoat, find a tarp in the shed, and walk out in the dark to cover the soil.  Finding nothing else to save from rain, I stop for a while and listen to it, watch the glistening in the dark, on leaves, on the shiny metal of my car caught in the still-bright lamplight on the street, on the flagstones and tree barks.  

It's not so much this task which has drawn me out, I realize, but the rain itself.  The bag of soil was only an excuse to be out in this early air, be out in the cooling-down that rain brings.  So I don't rush back into the house, though under my hooded coat I am still in my nightgown.  Carefully I pick my way across the front of the house, almost, but not quite, tripping over a stone I will ask Alexander and his friend Louis to dig out for me. (And thank you, stone, I think, for not tripping me, as grateful for that as for the rain.)  

Instead, I stay listening from the porch, cup warming my hands. There are many shades of light that manage to transform dark...if only I could turn that into a piece of art, to hold it, the thought and the light-frought dark itself, in something more than a memory.  Before waking, I dreamed (the dream itself is gone now) that I told myself something important...what was it?...oh, that I am better beginning things than finishing them.  (Well, I knew that.) If I sit here in the dark, rain alone attending (or attending alone this rain), will more illuminations come to me?  These days, introspection...the need for, the ground for...seemS more dire.  What I have to learn yet, to yearn after...surely dreams cannot hold it all.

At first there is only the sound of rain accompanying me, but then, at odd intervals, a sound like thunder rumbling, though more muffled, not sharp-edged like thunder, sets me wondering.  Nothing like lightning appears. The rain is too soft for that.  Maybe a plane?  But the growling to last that long is strange, like plane after plane, and anyway, it isn't often we hear planes going over head; a helicopter, yes, going to and from the medical center pad, but it isn't a sound like a helicopter.  (And a whole raft of planes...why?)

There is no wind, either.  The rain falls, almost gently, not needle-hard, straight down.  The back motion-light goes on...maybe a deer or rabbit, picking carefully her time to venture nearer my herbs.  Another car, tires hissing on the blacktop, this time from the main road going downhill, sets me wondering about its destination.  Perhaps a farmer about to set up at the Farmer's Market.  Someone opening the drug store at the corner.  Someone driving a young one to the Y for swim team.  Or going to Saturday work, not perhaps happy with rain, but bearing with it to get where they need to go, glad it's not a storm they need to drive in, or weekday traffic.

Or someone who, like me, is just awake early, going for coffee or an errand they made up just to be out.  Being out in it, accepting what rain and its dispersion of light offers, is a way of being inside oneself.

Interior

I look across the street, and next door, but there are no windows lit yet.  It won't be the distracting glare of daylight, inside or out, for a while yet.