I used to take it for granted.
Exactly two weeks shy of two years ago and living on that
dark island, I submitted an essay to a prominent journal about the specialness
of a sunny day there: how rare, how exotic, how cherished.
Now I live in another place. Dry. Desert-like. Sunny
almost always. And I am writing an essay about the specialness of a rainy day
here: how rare, how exotic, how cherished.
The rain sates a long, hungry thirst that lives on the
chapped skin of this earth…desiccated plants, and soil that has to flood first
- forming pools and puddles on its surface before it can take the water deeply into
itself and turn its body to mud in the rain that falls and pours some more.
My bamboo chimes sound as the rain brings a breeze, and I
listen carefully to a profoundly moving memory of something I cannot seem to
identify but which I can feel in the deepest, darkest place in my gut; it knows
me by name.
I listen to the pouring rain on grass, another un-nameable
sound and I am suddenly aware of the word “kiss.” When I let go the sounds of
dripping gutters, raindrops splatting into puddles, torrents striking the tin
roof, what I hear is a very tiny kissing sound like lips on skin, but instead: raindrops
on grass blades.
Out in a parking lot, I suddenly realize that while my
feet are dancing around puddles in an attempt to keep my socks dry, I cannot
feel the water on my skin. There are drops on my cheeks but my face doesn’t
register “wet;” only my fingertips, as they brush across my nose, realize there
is actually water on my body. I know it’s farfetched to write that my own
overly dry skin is just as non-porous as the soil on the earth around me and
that they are equals. Both skin – of a human body, of the body of the earth. Both
are resistant to water absorption. Both desperately need the hydrating
nourishment of moisture.
I am singing praises for rain in this arid warm
usually-bright sunny place, just as I sang praises for sun’s warmth in the
other usually-gray misty place.
Both please me.
As the rain pours into the pores of this soil, saturating
and feeding and creating songs of wet bliss, I am called back to myself. Just
for today. And when the sun returns with its enveloping warmth, I will be
called back to myself then too.
All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
