Notes on rain, and on waiting for it

It has not rained properly here for thirty-one days. I know because I have been counting, in pencil, on the back of the door, which is not the kind of thing I used to do. The grass along the lane has gone the colour of a paper bag. The brook that runs past the grain shed has stopped running and started, instead, to sit.

Waiting for rain is a strange occupation for someone who doesn't farm. I have no crop to lose. But everyone I write about does, and so for a month every conversation has bent toward the sky. The dairy farmer up the hill is feeding winter silage in September. The market gardener on the flat is watering at night, from a tank she will have to pay to refill. People talk about the forecast the way they talk about a relative in hospital: carefully, with a hope they try not to show.

When it came, last Sunday, it came as a sound first. A hiss in the ash tree, then on the roof, then everywhere at once, and the particular smell that dry ground gives off when it is finally allowed to drink. I stood at the kitchen window for most of an hour and did nothing useful at all.

One wet evening doesn't end a dry season. The soil needs weeks of it, slow and steady, the kind nobody writes essays about. But I rubbed the thirty-one off the back of the door anyway, and started again from one.