Time has been
escaping me this week—faster than ever.
It’s Thursday already, and nearly the end of April. It feels almost as if there’s been some
kind of time warp. Our weather has
transported us forward into summer, and even the rain we had last night felt
like a summer rain as I came out of poetry class into the quad, warm and
nurturing, like walking in a kind of balm.
I remember a
similar rain one August in childhood, snug inside the cavernous wooden interior
of Yellowstone Lodge, when my father taught me to play ping-pong. Rain this time of year in Santa Fe just
before school was out for the summer, riding bicycles with a new friend past
Gormley’s Grocery on Canyon Road (long gone) and all the artists’ studios up to
the school in the canyon. Rain at
Hadrian’s Wall two years ago, the “edges of empire,” with sheep calling on all
sides, amiable spirits, and a swath of green below. Rain in Kona, one later Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting
in a favorite sweater and old pair of jeans in my room at the hotel across the
harbor from the birthplace of the stillborn king, watching a single kayak
riding in at dusk.
Rain allows crops,
and crops of memories as well. The
resurgence of times past, in lush profusion, even when time present is so
scant.
And it encourages
the drinking of tea, in a smooth lipped cup from St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, and
the concoction of a tagine with chicken and eggplant for today’s supper, after
Pilates, after another fleeting April day.
I will end with a
sun-summoning thought from a book of Cherokee meditations I’ve just found again
on my shelves,
Very soon, we will sit together in the sun a whole day and just be happy that we can sit together in the sun all day and just be happy.
That, like the
rain, offers a sense of great abundance.
image: Drops of
rain (1903), Clarence H. White
.jpg)
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