Rain

Microfiction

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Rain, Steam, and Speed

The dirt breathes first. An inhalation of expectation. And the ether of it rises heavenward. It is a thanksgiving, it is a crying out of the eldest hatchlings in a nest they’ll never leave, but by nature so. The man who stands beneath the awning of his house with boots that will lick the puddling runs can get it secondhand, and oh it is lovely. That wafting, that musk of cloudy sweet, like the scent of breast milk in the gummy yawn of a newborn: how it fills his lungs and mixes there with every other air he has in him. This wet incense, this liquorish odor, this nursery perfume is what traps in the fingernails of the gardener. It is what drops in the sweat of the harvester. Like the seamstress who puts steam to the wrinkled shirt, so does the earth’s steam lay out and even the cares of the man, the quiet burdened man who breathes in gulps now like on his first birth day.