Rain Girls

Dawn, trees shrugging the rain off, shrubs bowing to the wind. Faint blue light. This is home, to me: the ragged trees and the rain, going barefoot onto the porch of a morning to see what the sky is doing; the steel-gray sky looking almost bright between the black leaves, black posts, black power wires; and everything moving and flickering as the windborne rain slaps it. 

Suppose you were struck blind while on a ladder: you'd hold very still while you thought it out. Then you'd deliberately drop whatever was in your hands -- hammer, paint scraper, screwdriver -- and slowly feel your way down the steps, one by one. Like that.

And sometimes I feel so light, and so much a part of the sky, that it seems like the wind might lift me and send me tumbling up over wires, where all that silver and steel light shifts and sweeps, up and up, to where the laughing rain girls live, and no one strives.