The Unrelenting Allure of Coming Rain

Vivid chroma

There is an unrelenting allure here for the coming rain. Mother Nature, her behavior tantamount to wild horses, heralds an impending crash of glacial temperatures. She warns, "make cover."

When I awoke this morning, there was a rhinocerial heaviness in the atmosphere. My body vibrated, keenly aware of damp cold moving in, that deep down, bone chilling kind of cold I don't like.   Shivering, I rushed back inside to the warmth of my sweet, hot coffee, declarations of oaths falling from my mouth against the encroachment to which Old Man Winter is so now devoted.  Funny, I muse, how our aging physical state actually alerts us to shifts in our climate.

The last few days, this sanctuary has been brimming over with vivid chroma and warming sunlight, brief windows in which to bask in the temperate days of autumn.  Personal walks have been filled with glorious blue skies, punctuated by wispy clouds against backdrops of imperial colors. 

I now find myself bracing for the permutation that will have most of us here hunkering down against the brash, wetness being slung in our faces. The attendant reds and golds, once so vibrant, against that glacial expanse, will fade into indeterminate shades of blacks and browns, reminders that daily life is going to ground, to sleep, to rest, to wait upon the next revival.

That rain, however little or much, will initiate the process of cleaning and removal.  Taking with it bits of the old and dirty until the landscape sits frighteningly barren, a slick canvas upon which father winter will be licensed to employ his artistic visions.  

As a child, I loved the rain. Its clean smell brought a quiet joy to my soul. Grow up along the Gulf Coast, and witness the rain come down in waves, drops arrayed like hoochie coochie dancers, in line after line, cavorting mystically from one end of the bay to the next.

Grow up along that coast, and inevitably you'll come to testify of the gawd awful misery of too much when hurricanes roll through, bringing with them inexplicable acts of annihilation.

Rain. Intrinsically and unrelentingly alluring, its elemental power to nourish requires our genuflection.  Its primordial ability for destruction demands our obeisance.  At its axiomatic core, rain's very essence, heralds change. 

A light breath of wet kisses my cheek. I close my window.  Change, it seems, is here.