Rain-Swollen Summer

For weeks we joked semi-superstitiously about forty days and forty nights. Drizzles. Downpours. Rain-swollen summer defying even the most cynical armchair forecasters.

Lawns boggy; vegetable garden anemic; air thick with suspended moisture like wading through water; foliage flush, overgrown, greener than green; docks swallowed and gradually dismantled by higher, higher, higher lake levels.

When forty days and nights gully-washed away June-into-July and then July-into-August we began to joke about summer 3023 redos, refunds, rain checks. But the rains were unmoved with humor, showing no signs of ceasing. And so we play in the mud, dance in the rain, and laugh through the soggiest summer in anyone’s memory.

Rain-Swollen

Wandering byways,
homeward but slowly,
meanderingly,
an audiobook
narrating with the
wipers’ metronome,
my damp dog snoring.
I coast to a stop
in a mud-rutted
pullout perched above
the turgid river’s
chocolaty milkshake.

This piece of poetry is still coalescing. Wood paneling selling and buckling. Cucumbers overswelling and undercoloring. This rain-swollen summer is still in the works as are the words and the lyrics best suited to celebrate and memorialize an unanticipated adventure. Adventures.

As I write these words, the deluge continues. Cats and dogs. But freshly drenched world is bathed in sunlight so bright I have to squint. Somewhere, somehow the sun has found a crack in the clouds. Somewhere, somehow there MUST be a rainbow painting colors across the sky. I’m heading outside to take a look…