We’ve had lots of rain the past few days. The streams are flowing through the woods. The chickadees are tittering and laughing.
There are so many things to love about the rain. Most of all, how it strips the trees bare.
Naked tree limbs and soaked tree trunks make such lovely patterns against the sky. Calligraphic ink strokes, sumi paintings framed by every window.
We can watch so easily now their figures swaying against the mountain winds. The yogic limbs of sourwoods.
The sculpted costume of loblolly pine. The heavy fingers of black oaks, and the net of a spreading dogwood.
The first winter we moved to Georgia, I’d lay on my back in the dirt and stare up at the trees. The patterns of those black-ink giants as they curved up and out to find the best sunlight.
The drought has been so strange. This is very late in the year for our trees to still have foliage. We’re still seeing black bears roaming our community, and they should have been asleep weeks ago. A friend spotted a copperhead still roaming around.
The rains have erased the strangeness, rewritten the forest into equilibrium.
The driveway is full of leaves again, but that’s just another excuse to get out the leaf blower.
Today’s penny is a 2008, my first months of soaking in the long and lovely Georgia winter rains.
P.S. Yesterday I discovered that the tarp over our damaged roof was leaking and has damaged floors and ceilings. Even that couldn’t make me hate the rain.
You remind me to take joy in the rain and not fret so much about my leaky roof 🙂