After days of driving rain, the water wins.
This house, with its multitude of windows, opens the valley to me from every angle. Sunrise paints the kitchen in pink light, filtered through pine needles as I sit with my morning coffee. Day spills across golden wooden floors. Sunset burns red and purple through the glass panels set in the front doors. At night, moonbeams trace paths for anyone waking in darkness. From my desk, movement at the edge of sight often draws my eye—deer making their silent rounds, a fox slipping through thicket shadows, a hawk plunging toward unseen prey, the wind lifting leaves into sudden dance.
How curious that this is a house of windows when my childhood summers by the sea were spent in a house of doors. Our Cape Cod cottage builder had secured a bargain on doors, making them more economical than lumber or drywall. Floors, ceilings, walls—all doors. Even the kitchen table where I ate as a child was a door, smooth beneath small elbows. Through these doors, I walked to the car that carried me to college. Through these doors, I welcomed small children rushing to see their grandparents, their footsteps thundering across door-plank floors. And through these doors, I stepped out for the last time on trembling legs, knowing those narrow hallways and tight corners would never welcome a wheelchair’s width. Strange how memory crafts its own perfect metaphors.
For all the wonders of my windowed home, gloom seeps in with the dampness when rain falls for days, as it has this week. Droplets trace silver paths down glass panes. Water pools in the valley’s lowest hollows, mirroring patches of sky. It cascades from the hills onto the driveway, carving miniature canyons toward the front walkway. It lifts mulch from garden beds, sweeping particles across the grass like dark wine spilling across white linen. As dusk approaches, every trunk and branch darkens—except those wrapped in lichen, which seems to glow with the green of glow-in-the-dark prizes once hidden in breakfast cereal boxes.
When rain begins, it smells fresh and clean, like laundry dried in sunlight. After days, the downpour erodes earth, releasing dark scents of loam and decomposing leaves. Nearly a week in, mustiness rises as dormant mildew and mold awaken, stretching invisible fingers to feast on waterlogged matter in the woods and basement alike.
Water’s unyielding voice fills every corner. Rain sheets against the roof like faint applause. It splashes from the broken gutter above the stone patio. It taps the glass with wet fingertips and draws dull metallic pings from the aluminum wheelchair ramps flanking my doors. Outside, the stream’s gentle gurgle swells to a lion’s roar, echoing off valley walls. Inside, the sump pump clicks on repeatedly, heart-like, bailing out groundwater seeping through the foundation. Water finds every path, patient and persistent, exposing any flaw that isn’t watertight.
The gloom of a long, rainy week can feel inescapable—claustrophobic—especially when you’re already confined to a wheelchair, your voice too weak to rise above the drumming of rain. The grayness outside eventually seeps into my mind like basement water, threatening to flood thoughts with shadows.
But then, I remember gratitude.
Unlike the deer or doves huddled in drenched leaf litter, I am dry and warm at home. I close my eyes and listen to the rhythm of raindrops against roof and window—nature’s oldest lullaby. I hear the laughing sound of a waterfall from the clogged gutter onto patio slate. Opening my eyes, I notice the luminous reflection of soft gray sky in raindrops clinging to white windowpanes, each a perfect universe.
I remember that this drenching is exactly what spring requires to reach its green becoming. Water seeps underground, and the parched roots of trees that endured winter’s drought now drink deeply, ancient mouths swallowing life. Buds swell red with promise. Tender leaves unfurl in slow motion. Without these dreary spring weeks, the valley could not transform into the living, green, fragrant Pennsylvanian jungle it will become.
Now flowing upward through tree trunks, this flood will soon become a thick forest canopy. Katydids and cicadas will cling to rain-fed leaves, filling warm summer nights with thunderous songs. Screech owls will trill as they hunt tree frogs singing in the heights.
Morning will greet us with the scents of honeysuckle, rambling rose, and mowed grass; with waking robins warbling from green branches to announce the new day; with bees, butterflies, and beetles beginning their work; and with great green colossi rising from the banks of the stream, swaying their leafy heads in the morning breeze.
Later, the sun will warm dewy grass, water vapor rising in ghostly wisps, returning to the sky.
One Response
Your brilliant, poetic observations are so relevant and needed right now. I think we’re all desperately looking for ‘signs of Spring’ with its warm glow to somewhat mitigate what feels like a world in unbearable chaos. Thank you.
Sending much love.
Leigh