Appreciations (6) …sounds of rain

Appreciations (6) …sounds of rain
Torrey Orton
June 10, 2009

Sounds of rain, not sights or feels or smells of it, are a blanket to my spirit in the cool of drought. The rain in Melbourne comes slowly, lightly, a susurration on the roof, but felt as a slight change in air pressure almost, at the verge of audibility for my fading hearing. Maybe almost a complement to my tinnitus, falling as it does at the edge of my hearing range. Sometimes the fall advances to a discernible patter of delicate feet, ramping up suddenly into a splash or rolling thunder approaching the downpour’s roar, to fall again, more vertiginously, down the hearing scale to the background sounds of our street and the splatter of drops from eaves and bushes outside my windows.

Sweet music this… one that I grew up with in New England where drought was a content-free concept. Here in the second half of my life I have learned to embrace drought in its austere and astringent beauty. It is a comparatively soundless condition when searing northerlies stop. I long, intently, for rain; almost any will do. Early winter is a clouded time but mostly, still, rainfree this year like the 8 before it only even more free!

Our rain often wakes me at night when it comes, though too often it’s just a squall, a rush of spattering breeze long enough to blotch the dust on exposed surfaces but not to wash anything clean. The sound is the greater than effect. It cleanses the internals if not the surfaces. I can live longer better without a bath than I can without a clarification of my innards.

Now it has been almost 2 hours of constant shifting from susurration to light roar as I pass back and forth between eating and writing. At last, nothing. Probably I can sleep.