The Creek

I knew it was going to rain.  For ten days now we'd had perfect weather, the sun holding court incessantly through the afternoons, like some judge bent on sitting case after case with only an occasional small cloud obscuring its face and a break for recess.

All afternoon the blue void that prevailed weeklong was threatened to the north by pale then darkening clouds rolling broken and building over the mountains.

I wanted it to rain for two reasons.  I planted a garden and the basil and tomato germs cower baking under the judge's gaze until the shadows of the ash trees creep over them and I water them with buckets drawn from the well across the field.  And I come from a place with seasons of both long and short time scales so that even three or four days of the same weather seems unnatural to me.

The first sign is thunder ambling over the pass above us, muffled by distance and broken unevenly upon ravines and hillsides.  Still the sun towers but now less malignant clouds herded sheeplike scurry before the dark pack of wolves challenging its authority.  Any breeze and the birds carry upon cease to add their voice to the world and the world waits, temporarily substituted for a world in which all things dead and alive exist only as placeholders.  The only sound is the creek rushing by the house over the rocks and a new one slowly, exponentially builds with the creek's, cousins in the the repertoire of nature's sounds but yet still distinguishable.  One crescendoing, the creek holding steady like two sections in an orchestra, the rain building and now they are intertwined, the conductor holding his palm knifelike sideways to the rain and baton still at the creek, until he twists his hand holds upward his palm and raises it methodically, steadily up, the rain again surging and drowning the creek's voice beneath its own.

It goes on like this for an hour, the rain's noise above and then below the creek's and now above again, slowly and deliberately playing out the movements of piano and forte prescribed thousands of feet above.  I know that the rain has added its voice to the creek and will continue to sing through the creek long after it ceases singing.