MindSpinner

Hot from mowing until the rain began to fall, I lingered today in the garden, listening to the crescendo of pattering, cooled by the drops. I sat on the stone bench for a time, still, drinking in the scent of roses and thyme, rain and earth, and the sight of the little path the stones make where there was none before, wending around the strawberries and back to the corner where the grape vines have found their way over the arbor and then beyond into the grass where the shade garden is still only an idea sketched in seedlings.

The hummingbird was not there today, in the rain with the roses, but it was there yesterday, twice. I heard it then before I saw it, a vibration of wings, not three feet from my face as I bent to examine a flower. Yesterday, too, in the evening, the groundhog ambled out of the wild grasses and goldenrod that line the back of the yard along the old farm fence. Everyone I have told about the groundhog tells me how to be rid of it, but the groundhog and I have neighborly pact.

I stayed out in the rain until the urgency of trivial things pulled me indoors, but trivial things could not have me until I’d posted this acknowledgment.