THE EARLY RAIN

The air outside the window pane is brisk and damp. It hasn’t been like this for months, years actually. But suddenly everything is clean and washed, the rain was just in time. I think, “Floods always follow droughts.” But it may just seem that way, and it only seems that way when the rains finally come.

I taste the air, and it is loamy with the heavy fragrance of soil and sod and the washings from the trees, the dust that has accumulated for the past three years. The dust and the rain form a thin gruel – more discolored water than real mud, and it coats everything until it too is washed away – to the drain and then to the ocean. It gives me a sense of excitement; the world is not going to turn into a crisp, fragile pile of debris after all.

Seeds sprout suddenly from the soil; the seeds that have waited for months or even years. The seeds know that the rain will come again. They surge from the ground with such vigor that they move the soil up and out of the way, as if they don’t want to waste a minute or a second of this rare chance to be something, and they must beat their brothers and sisters who are competing for the limited light. They look exactly alike; the same size and shape and bright green. It seems that I could watch them grow it all happens so fast.  But they are too close, the way naturally falling seeds collect in the same spot. So many will die – too little sun, strangled by a brother, cheated of enough water. But it’s a numbers game – so much of life is. You roll the dice, you are the result of rolled dice, the numbers always win.

The sky takes on a special blue, different than the blazing summer sun that wilts and dries and chokes. This is a growing sun, with a special light that energizes everything it touches. But it is a false sun, one that brings things out too early, that jump starts life and in a week or two, the frost will come and most of these eager shoots will wither and die. But, perhaps there will be enough left over seeds to germinate following the next rain and the true warmth that will surely follow.