Winter Rain
I closed my eyes and just listened to the rain and thought of all the roofs I had heard deflect the drops. Shingle and metal, flat trailer and peaked home, my own and someone else's. This heavy rain on the last day of January, a month that lasted a year, felt both cleansing and mournful. Rid ourselves of a month of chaos and uncertainty. The new year already fading and the promise of something new already turning sour. It has not been new, but old thinking that has seeped into our everyday through the inauguration of fascism. But there is no promise of February suddenly holding something different. That a calendar flip will bring clarity.
This winter rain, that really should be snow only makes clearer the future we're facing when the ice melts and the shoreline shrinks and winter becomes a memory.
The bare branches collect single drops like bright memories clinging to neurons. A tangle of experience dripping away and being replaced one by one, the old with the new, the stretched to breaking with the fresh bubble of clear thought. Can the dormant tree drink from winter water, or do the droplets puddle in vain, unable to penetrate the frozen ground and reach to the root tips? Like our own self image unable to absorb the nutrients of today's victories?