It’s a cool, dense September rain, grey as the sky, its splashes welcomed by the bowed heads of late summer’s garden. It is noisy, it is quiet, back and forth, to make me listen.
The images of the day, the somber pageantry in England, the shock and suffering of 9/11, tumble about in my head, looking for grounding.
At my front door, out of the rain’s refreshment, the potted pineapple mint looks longingly outward, poor thing, that cannot move itself. I step out into the cool drone of the shower, and there, against the sostenuto of the rain, the cricket’s aria. A piercing oneness.
The mint looks grateful as the drops wash over it, and I stand, stopped.
Were you ever surprised, dear reader, at how the tumble in your head was stilled by something so simple and ordinary as cricket song?
For presentation Puritan
Oddments 