The air feels suddenly heavy. There’s more energy and weight in it than there was only moments ago. My eyes strain their tiny radial muscles to adjust to the sudden change in light. Rolling folds of gray and tumbling currents move overhead. It’s darker now. The sky looks like the surface of the ocean, I imagine, if I were looking up from a thousand feet below.
I have been tired all week. Tired from the heat and drought. I’ve been feeling the wilted, dusty exhaustion of the trees.
There is thunder. Far off. Very soft. Big billows of purple cotton candy. That’s what the sound of thunder looks like. It is voluminous, rich, heavy, sweet.
I hear it louder now. Closer. I sit up from my after-work nap. An energy builds in me, like the tension in the sky that turns into lightning. It feels like someone has popped a new set of batteries into me. I open the door and run down the long dirt driveway. The leaves are still dusty gray. The oaks look tired. The clethra slumped and limp. But we are hopeful.
I reach the pavement as the first drops fall. The road becomes darker and the smell of summer rain on the hot road wafts up and fills my mind. It is probably volatile chemicals baked onto the asphalt, rising with the water vapor. I don’t love what this smell is. I love what it means.
The drops are big now as I turn down the dirt track to my right. Fat drops slapping limp, dry leaves. On the sandy trail, the pine needles shift. Little twigs jump as the rain hits them. The sand has been so long without rain it has forgotten how to receive it.
Standing at the edge of the pond, I am aware that it is not wise to swim in a thunderstorm. But I wade out as the sky bursts open. The surface of the pond comes alive. The water feels warm. The sense of separation between me and the pond disappears. I swim out toward the middle. An uncontainable joy floods into me, grows, and buzzes in my whole self.
I recall a conversation with a friend about a swim in a pond in the rain. She told me how she stood with the water at eye level and watched as the rain hit the surface. I sink down, my ears and mouth beneath the surface. Only my eyes and nose are still above it, seeing and breathing what is not the pond. And here it is before me: the workings of the universe. Undeniable.
Perfect drops fall from the sky. They become the pond the moment the surface breaks to let them in. The pond accepts these drops. And as it closes in around the spot the drop has entered, another drop jumps to the sky, a drop in reverse, bouncing upward in response. The laws of motion are at play. The drop rises and, for a moment, it is still, weightless, a perfect sphere. A million perfect spheres are suspended above the pond.
A haze hangs over the water. I look closer and see something new: little spheres of water that have broken from the splashing land on the pond. The surface tension keeps them from breaking through. They look like drops of mercury rolling around. They bounce on the surface until a bit of water that has been disrupted lets them back in.
A water spider, weaving its way through the pond-in-motion, swims up to one of the drifting spheres and grabs onto it. She who has mastered surface tension carries the ball of water away.
My ears tell me I am breathing. My lungs push against the weight of the pond to fill with air. I hear the percussion of drops on the top of my head. Below, a more delicate sound, a metallic tinkling, clear but not sharp.
The more I choose to notice, the more I see. The more I see, the more I feel a part of a million tiny moments of devoted involvement. Life grows bigger. Raindrops that make the storm.
