The season’s first tropical storm arrives like a wanderer from the south, breaking a long drought. For five days, Gulf moisture pours from sky to soil. The thirsty valley drinks until no space remains—then overflows.
Water becomes the world. It threads silver paths down the forest valley hillsides and moves in sheets across the kiln-baked clay of the lawn. The driveway becomes a stream, carrying the dust of summer away. Dark mulch drifts downhill, leaving trails like mascara tears across the lawn’s green face. Water pools in low sections of the yard, replacing grass with a mirror of the wild, gray sky.
The basement floods.
Our stream awakens from drought-sleep. Not long ago, it held only scattered, tepid pools where crayfish, frogs, and creek chub crowded into tight quarters—easy pickings for the patient heron. Now it surges: muddy, fast, and deep—a living memory of the ancient power that carved this valley.
Drenched from the pouring rain, we move our streamside rocking chairs up the slope, humbled witnesses to water reclaiming what was always its own. The gentle stream now speaks in the barbaric tongues of torrent, splash, and bubble, carrying its shouted highland anthem toward the rushing river, swollen bay, and patient Atlantic waiting to receive it all.
Above, wind moves with its own wild intelligence, setting forest giants into motion. Treetops whip against the steel-gray sky. The air fills with sound— leaves rustling in their desperate grip, branches creaking and groaning as they struggle to stay whole. Surrender comes with a crack like thunder, and a crash that you can feel in your chest.
Yet look closely at the trunks.
Here, where wood communes with earth—where roots spread deep through soil to touch stone and water, where they weave with neighboring trees and shelter countless burrowing creatures—all remains still. The source of branch and leaf remains unmoved while the heights thrash with the storm.