Falling Water

September 5th, 2011, 7:01 p.m.

Rain falling from the sky as I arrive home with full belly and half-empty heart.  The sky was pewter-white, the drops pregnantly silver.  They fell soft in an aqueous sibilance that I've yet to decide reminds me of the sound of frying bacon or a crowd of people whispering all at once.

I looked up once to gauge the heaviness of the clouds.  A fat drop on my glasses caused me to flinch a little.  I hurried down my front steps to enter the house.  My first thought was that I wanted to sit at my little table on the porch, and listen to the rain.

The crickets and birds were striking up the band.  In the tree just in front I could hear something rustling around and squawking.  At me or the cats across the street, I don't know.  There are enough trees and shrubs near my house that being outside in the evenings the acoustics almost sound like being in the woods.  I enjoy that timbre, that pitch.  I often fantasize that I have my own little writing studio, surrounded by or near to a substantial grove of trees.  There are two windows I can open, right in front of my desk, and the sound and the breeze please me when I write.

In my fantasy, of course.  For now, I make do with a console in my dining room and the occasional stint in the wire mesh chairs at the slate tile covered table on the porch.  It is my hope that it will not be that way for much longer, that someday my computer and my notebooks and my pens will have a permanent eyrie in which to nest.  Portability has its charms, but I crave that special place for them to rest.  To know that I won't essentially be restarting every time I sit down to write.

I must rephrase.  This wasn't intended to be quite so much about writing.  Wait...a cicada is chirruping loudly, and it has distracted me.  Ah.  There.  It has stopped.

No, this wasn't supposed to be so much about writing.  It was supposed to be about the profundity of rainfall, the knowledge and calm to be found in listening to its journey to the earth.  It is a sound I had forgotten on my way to becoming a man in his 40's, sitting in a chair and trying to make sense of the clamor in his head.  It is a sound I heard in my youth, but didn't listen to when I should.

The rain falls now, my head and my heart sit up and take notice.  Rain, silver from blue into green, giving gloss and depth to the world.  This is what rain does: it has spoken the secrets in my heart.  I do not bemoan that I cannot fall from the sky to do the same; instead, I fall into the page, seeking gloss and depth, and secrets.