Drowned Leaves

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturned bucket from the sky dumping just on my head. I reach my hands up and out, as if that can stop my getting wetter, and open my mouth, trying to swallow the downpour, till it finally hits me how funny it is, my trying to stop the rain.

This is so funny to me, I laugh and laugh, as loud and free as I want. Instead of hurrying to higher ground, I jump lower, down off the curb, splashing through the puddles, playing and laughing all the way home . . .  It taught me to understand rain, not to dread it. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when I'd find myself without an umbrella. But my understanding would act as my all-purpose slicker and rubber boots. “

                                                   - Antwone Quenton Fisher, Finding Fish: A Memoir

“There is an eternal love between the water drop and the leaf. When you look at them, you can see that they both shine out of happiness.”

                                                  - Mehmet Murat ildan

My place is a place of rain. On the West Coast, where rain-heavy clouds lumber in off the ocean, where the tall flora fingers of thirsty trees pluck the candy-floss bits from the sky and adorn their heads with them, pulling the wet down to their roots – here, rain is perpetual.

Once the autumn rains begin, we forget the essence of the summer’s amber sol, the luminous transparency of parched air. Instead we remember a language of rain – drizzle, mist, shower, deluge, torrent, mist, fog, cloudburst, condensation; the fall, the pouring, the spate of rain.

The leaves dribble bubbles of moisture from their tips like they have chronic post-nasal drip. The soil squelches and the sidewalks are slick. The last of the summer flowers that were struggling to maintain a bloom-ful presence well into the Fall, now bow their damp-blackened heads and evolve into compost.

I am most intrigued by drowned leaves. Deep in ponds, pocked violently by raindrops hard and steady, leaves cluster at the bottom, preserving their colour and form for as long as they can. Drowned, they keep their leaf-ness, while their ill-starred kin, beaten out of existence by the rain on the sidewalk, become grey ghost-leaf shadows patterning the wet autumn cement.