December, 2014: Melting

(I have been challenging myself to write a short essay each week and posting it, even if not finished. This is not quite finished, but it gets posted anyway.)

All across the long wall ran two rows of square windows, each perhaps half the size of those old-fashioned sash & casing windows, but the wall was long, the length of the medical building and two stories tall. From across the lobby/waiting room the sixteen windows offered a punctuated view of the hillside that defined the horizon, softened now by a blue-grey fine mizzle that occasionally bloomed into rain, the undulating lines of the ridgeline lost and swallowed in the cloaking mists as the velvety-green, just-quickened fields flowed down the slopes and across the fields towards us. Each window offered its own square composition of hillside and mizzle, some with sections of soft-focus white farm buildings, others with the orange-leafed trees of fall.

The windows say take what you can, make what you will of this lopsided, melting world. Look how these square frames set things to rights, how they sequence the landscape dissolving in the essence of time. These pushed-up tectonic wrinkles were once the bottom of an ancient sea; now they are slip-sliding under the green-mantled fields that even just yesterday were cracked and blistered, with dusty, baked-brittle grass cropped short by cattle, stunted by drought.  These squares stop the motion of time for this instant; we watch the skies bless the land with water,  we witness the grass, the hills take what they need, make what they will, the moment opportunity strikes. 

When Damp Begs to Drop Out

We were kept on hold all day yesterday,
(swear it's going to rain any darn second now),
the air thick and lugubrious, dense with potential.

By mid-afternoon, the world had gone silent,
no chittering, twittering, or chipping,
no trills or calls of songbirds.

The tribe of Canada geese, fifty strong,
had plumped down on the lawn,
all facing southwest, bills tucked under wings.

Around four pm, a herd of ravens, had to have been thirty or more,
came galloping across the sky, wheeling and calling, landing on the roof opposite us, slipping over the far edge to hunker under the wide eaves.

The damp in the air begged to drop out.

Then, well after dark, the first hesitant patters of rain, a tickling along the roof. Plinkety plonk plinkety on the tin spark-cover of the
chimney pipe, the tympany of rain.

In the wee-est hours of the night, the storm strolled into the county, commanding all airspace, pummeling trees, filling up creek beds and ditches. Attention!

This morning, the rain rustles and rushes, swatted by wind-gusts against the window. Wind wrestles the taller trees, messes about with the smaller ones, nothing is still.

The birds and animals will sleep the day away in nooks and hollows, under eaves and logs, tucked amongst the fat leaves of the canna lilies.

Only humans will walk about, with clutched umbrellas, impervious foot-gear, tightly sealed coats, blown half-sideways and soaking wet.