Rain rolled in as wall of mist that whispered on the earth but was silent on other side of windows and walls. He walked into it under morning dark, cool and the damp upon him, sounds of its whisper and little more, moved on wind he could not feel.
Indoors, he sat in the dark. Rain built further, and he heard it fall in gathered drip guttered spouts and steepled ledge of roofs where gutters weren’t.
He thought to his garden, worked and seeded and covered back before the rain’s arrive. In the moisture, seed would take: that of crop and, too, what was grown for cover and soil’s health—a living mulch adding carbon, nitrogen, and roots for later crops to follow, husbandry and care for land dismissed in modern days.
Maybe times were changing, not reversion, but a cycling back as all of time and nature does to a simpler way, purer means, and bounties that come of one’s own efforts and not expense into commercial and material promise that raised costs in all, killed much, and enriched little beyond what was before; but as what was before is forgotten, we believe the modern, for one has no history left on which to judge.
He looked forward to oats in spear and pierce of the earth, green rising into light; the two-leaf cotyledon beginning of peas growing into vine cover of the open soil, white of their flowers in late of May and picking and eating fresh from their pods, feast never reaching farther than soil in which they grew.
He thought of the sounds in season’s arrive; changed from the March-mist silence: birds in the dawn, birds in the day; insect songs as world returned again into full spectrum of spring and summered life in its expressions.
All was sun. World and season were on front end of the change; mist-front rain softening earth for return and rise and fecund of spring’s swell and showing through.
In his thoughts, in his silence, he heard footsteps soft behind.
Turning, finding, she was there—beautiful in meek’s begin. Her face like earth, still waking; lovely and endearing all the same. Strength of the rain then in sound of steady heavier fall.
Further like earth in spring fecund, life’s swell and showing through, she budded light in show through blouse. Mind-seeing, he dreamed beneath to redbud hue, tender vibrance witnessed in the spring.
She moved to kitchen corner, coffee’s hide under cover of vine loose falling from shelf above, her back to him, profile of her body lovely in room’s soft of light. As coffee poured, he rose to meet her where she stood; wrap of his arms, take of her body drawn close and into his; cant of her head, falling of hair away to free and open side. He kissed neck and shoulder tops, gently and quietly, to sounding fall of rain; breath of her sigh, swell of her chest in deep of after-draw; rain still falling, kiss still keeping, she—like earth—softening, waking in the gift.