Tuesday, September 22, 2009
12:30 pm
What I love about my balcony is that although I feel nestled in curtains of trees and animal dwellings, I have a roof to cover me during rainy days like this. The rain is a constant drizzle, falling on all sides around me coating the trees high leaves like the glaze of pottery being fired. The air is cool and the breeze sends hidden smells of damp earth and clean honey. Birds still faintly chirp in the background, yet the sound of raindrop tattering against the nearby canopies outcries the random birdsong’s call.
From up here, I can see the soil between weeds begin to darken and bleed rich with moisture. Each blade of grass is highlighted in the feeble sun’s rays hiding behind a sheet of rainclouds luring up above. The grass is long in my yard, and there are patches of blades that curl over and fall like a mini weeping willow. Being outside in the rain, feelings its wetness and hearing its fall, reminds me of camping. Whenever I am camping and it starts to rain, there is nowhere to go but inside a tent. Yet between me and the outside weather is a nylon sheathing, thick enough to keep out too much water, but thin enough that I can still hear the pellets as they tap like fingers against the sides, and still smell the earth beneath my bottom soaking up water in underground passageways. I still feel like I am “in it,” cleansing right along with the earth and its inhabitants.
The water comes down heavy against the gutter that lines my neighbor’s balcony. It sounds like denting metal in a bathtub, unnatural to this tree top height of pitter- patting rain drops and slowly stifling leaves. I cannot forget I am in a city however. The splashing of tires against the rain’s puddles echoes through the trees and into my balcony. I cannot see the obnoxious automobiles, yet I hear their turns and swivels.
Most of my fellow dwellers are hiding in their dens. The three groundhogs that live beside my balcony in a large vacant field are nowhere to be seen. When rain begins to pour, I’ve seen them scurry into their holes filling their entrances with the bush of their floppy tail. The bird’s nest that sits above my shoulder at the corner of the building’s roof is completely silent, except for the splatter of raindrops meandering through its woven fibers, falling from below on to the metal covered roof. My spider webs are all gone, blown away by the rain’s shifting winds, glistens of wet string falling graciously to the cemented walk below. And, although my fellow creatures who are usually here as my companions are gone, I do not feel lonely simply staring into the trees.
The honey locust looks like a dripping wet grandfather, its wrinkles and crevices collecting water and debris, its hunched-over trunk and branches darkening in the steady pour. It is cloudy and overcast, but the green is still lush. Green like limecicles and moist like their sweat, just after you open one up into room temperature. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice four birds leaping from branch to branch in the drooping pine that sits to my left. They seem to be talking to one another, trying to figure out what to do on this rainy rainy day.
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Very nice lyricism here, Libba. I like the way you involved all of your senses in evoking the rain. It's always interesting to me to think about what rain smells like. I guess what we think of as rain smells are really the smells of whatever the rain is falling on--grass, earth, etc. But sometimes there a sense of the air being washed and cleansed and it is as if the very air smells like rain.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this piece.