It has been raining now since Friday, Thursday, even. I can’t remember anymore how long the rain has been coming down. My students today, looking out on yet another shower, expressed disbelief. It isn’t like North Carolina to behave like this.
Tonight as I tucked Emma Grace into her bed, the rain came down with new weight: a downpour, real sheets of it saturating the driveway. We’ve wondered aloud together if it will be the rain that knocks the golden beech leaves to the ground, the leaves that have been hanging like bits of furled paper about the waists and knees of these trees.
But I’ve proposed to her another thought: that it will be the new leaves themselves, squeezed from impossibility into the light at the ends of the branches that finally cast these paper ones down, much like it was a new tooth that today forced one of Everett’s old ones away from his gum-line forever. With the tooth now gone, we can see the new one just beginning to emerge. Who knows how these things work?
Wherever I look now, I see the newly multiplied articulations at the ends of the trees’ branches. Buds are forming there and leaves are coming. The pear tree in our front yard has been white with flowers all week and now today I see pale green and tiny leaves curled all along the branches of the crabapple. Soon enough the architecture of branches and trunks will be subsumed in the green motion of summer life, and I will have to wait until November to see it again.
What is it about the change in season that so nearly recalls to my mind the seasons of years past? But it has always been like this. I remember leaving the house in Pittsburgh for the school busstop of a rainy morning and remarking to my mother that the world smelled like Japan. Maybe I was nine years old at the time.
It rains much more in Pittsburgh than it does here. Grey skies are not anomalous there, and the season’s changes come more slowly. Today, returning from my walk, I stopped to examine a cluster of snow drops in the yard, their pendant bells reminding me of the snow drops I helped my grandmother to plant in New York, the snow drops that bloomed through the melting snow in our garden in Pittsburgh.
This place revives a grief
as rain revives the smell of soil
and reminds you of things you need
at a basic level– water, and the sun.
Rain, of course, disappoints.
It forces a change of plans
and elicits a practical idleness,
a rejection of indifference.
The soil of this place is.
It persists, insists upon itself,
clothes sinuous roots of memory
embedded in the brain.
Here is a field, fallow
that should just go to seed
but that there are lilies, tender bells
bowing their heads in the rain.
