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Writer's pictureSam Baker

what trees want

A easy rain this moring. It started right at sun rise. slow. Like a soft snare with an occasional quiet rim right around 50 on the metro then gaining some other bigger rhythm when the symphony rain fell. I believe rain is almost always beautiful but I grew up in a place where rain was the difference between staying on the land or moving to Ft. Worth or Dallas or someplace far away where rain really didn't matter. We were driven from farming by the droughts of the late fifties. It was a slow steady trial of life. A long slow waiting. A bit like the plague but not nearly so deadly to so many. But the waiting- the lack of control. The lack of power. That feels familiar..

I walked out into it this morning. The rain. It feels like the drops are roughly uniform. Or not. But they are cold. Uniformly cold. I am surprised at the coldness of rain.


It has traveled far of course. And for a long long time. And must have come from a cold place.


This rain this water these droplets are part and parcel I think of original water. From whence flopped the creature that later walked and later flew and climbed. Not sure on how the time line went from ocean to airliners but somehow there was a timeline and it is all connected.


Otherwise me and us would not be here waiting out the plague. Our not flying waiting time. Maybe even moving back toward flopping back in the water but I hope not.


Anyway.


The rain was cold. Expected but still cold. I am surprised by the coldness of rain.


The trees are washed. The land is washed. The raw lumber out side, waiting to be fitted in a carport- is ready to warp and curl and become difficult to work with once the hot orange sun cooks the now wet lumber. Lumber wants to curve. Lumber wants to bend. Its memory as tree wants it to wrap and turn and wrap around other trees and do what trees do.


which is dance

like

Alvin Ailey

might do



the shine of rain on a galvanized bucked of yellow onions on an outside table made of cedar fence planks. May 12, 2020

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