Night Music

I had

every

intention

of

writing

last

evening...

Honest.

My subject was one I had really been looking forward to writing about. It will have to be patient and wait for another day. At night when I lay the children down to bed, I climb in with them and read our story. Then I hold one or the other, sometimes both, until they fall asleep. Definitely not the stuff of modern day parenting manuals, but it is my way none the less. I heard the sound of two deep heavy breathers and knew they were in dreamland, but very soon after I also heard something else. Tentative at first...ping ping ping. Then louder and more varied. It was raining. Our master bedroom is the only room on the second floor where the rooftop is the only thing between you and the sky. There is only a small attic office over this room and the rest is a soaring vault of the saltbox. When it is raining, it is the best room in the house for laying and listening to the sounds of water drops hitting the roof- other than the playroom which has the added feeling of cosiness because it is such an enclosed nook. So I lay there listening to the music, thinking about the piece I was going to write, the knitting I was going to work on afterwards, the latest issue of British Country Living I was going to finish. None of it happened. I lay there for hours just wrapped in a sense of peacefulness. I had spent the better part of the day raking, a never ending and extremely physical job here at Hawk's Run. So many bulbs were bursting forth. I had thought more than once that day that what these new little green beauties really needed was a good spring rain. Nature was certainly delivering. I laid there for hours and only realized around four am that I had actually fallen asleep to the melody. When we awoke this morning everything was aglow in green. It was as if the landscape had been magically transformed over night. No matter how hard nor long my work outdoors is, it is humbling to think that nature can only deliver that magical miracle of rainwater. Rainwater truly is the mother's milk of the outside world. Full of components that cannot be pushed out of the garden hose and specific to your plantings in the way that a mother's milk is specific to her child. The rain had the added component of soothing this mother into a deep sleep that was much needed after a hard day's work outside.