WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #23
It rained nine nights in a row. The first night I was up very late working on my business plan when I broke eye contact with my computer screen. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify. It was not the humming of the powerbook, not the fan overhead, not the refrigerator motor. What could it be?
I stepped out the back door and listened to the soft hush of the water on the glossy leaves of the apple tree. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the cool rush of air, the drops on my feet. This was a gentle rain at one in the morning, not the torrential flash flooding we always have to watch out for. The house was asleep, or at least anyone awake was being very quiet.
The second night it happened again. I got up from crunching numbers, or envisioning a new product, or working on my website, and walked into the kitchen, navigating around the squeaky patches of linoleum. As I drew water into the teakettle, I listened to the rain through the window screen and imagined I was in a fairytale like Scheherazade and 1001 nights of rain. I must finish my writing or the morning would bring my death. So long as it rained, I would have another day to live.
In the morning, it was like a secret between the sky and me. The barrel cactus started blooming, bright magenta spikes in the dirt. There was a sweet smell in the air and all the weeds started shooting up.
The pattern continued. On the third night I went to bed at a reasonable hour only to awaken suddenly at 3 am. It hadn’t been raining when I went to bed, but I was suddenly bolt upright and awake. The wind whipped the curtains horizontal. I went around closing windows on the north side of the house because huge icy drops were blowing in.
On the fourth night, I didn’t go to bed. The clouds rained, the thunder rumbled down and I worked. When the sky lightened, the clouds drifted apart, retreating from the other half of the day.
Then my secret was up. On the fifth night, it rained into the morning. And kept raining. Flash floods in arroyos, over an inch and a half of rain in Chimayo in 2 days, the most in a hundred years.
On the sixth night I overheard someone in a bookstore add up the nights of rain. Every afternoon the clouds built up against the eastern hills and the wind came rushing down on us, blowing plastic lawn chairs over, flipping trampolines in back yards, a precursor to the drops falling.
When the seventh night of rain came, people were complaining about it. I hadn’t caught up on my deficit of sleep from the fourth night and started having arguments with everyone.
On the eighth night I decided to go camping. I couldn’t stand humanity. I wanted just to work and write and not parent and not spend money and not talk to anyone about anything ever again. I drove up to Hyde Park on the way to the ski basin and found cabins I had never seen before, high up on the hillside amid the ponderosa pines. A creek bubbled merrily along, and no one else was around. I set up tent in the driest corner of the shelter and got everything inside just as the rains came banging on the corrugated steel roof.
When I came home the next day, they told me the rains had finally stopped, but I knew better. That night the soft rain began again, the new desert grasses greening in its favor.
