Respite

An unexpected respite: rain instead of a heat wave, and now a gentle cloudy day. Glad for my client this evening, in her little attic room upstairs: with the fan we'll be just fine. 

The voices all around me tumble and purl. I can distinguish nothing, but they form themselves into musical patterns and repetitions, with little crescendos of laughter from time to time. Mostly rising inflections: a questioning patter, as if everyone was uncertain and wondering. I float and tick with it, like an egg in its shell in a bubbling pot.

At a point of unexpected equilibrium. I've forgotten whatever it is I imagine I am supposed to do. I know it's getting warm out there, despite the overcast, but the air-conditioning is cold on my skin. When I got up this morning and saw that it had rained a little, and the ground was wet, I was relieved, and stood on the porch, perceiving the petrichor as a blessing, but missing its message: I saw only how glad the recently-cut grass was, and how the droplets were shining on the white hood of the Honda. 

The world has always been illegible, I guess, but I used to feel more often that there was a message I was missing. Now, not so much. Nothing written, nothing missed. I breathe deep, and there's a little sense of loss, but a larger sense that I am no longer wasting time on priestly nonsense. I have been too susceptible to plausible insinuations. "What if it says this?" Well, yes, what if: a thousand what ifs. But I want to actually know, and hold it in my hand. Or else to just breathe the air and the light for a couple of breaths, and then let this morning go, without instructions or summations or reviews. 

Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting.