All is Well

Rain moving in.

Incongruously, a stark black crow flaps across my line of vision to the drone of a jet hidden above a vast vast army of storm clouds that's muscling its way across the sky. Torpedo shaped, some of them, they swallow the blue in great gulps and devour the whiter, puffier clouds at the horizon. I do not want the rain, not today when the air is at last mild, temperate and balmy and springlike after so many weeks of cold. The lilac bush wants the rain, and the soft green shoots of daffodil and tulip, and the newly upturned garden beds, but not me. I want to be out of doors in the sunshine that smiled down from yesterday's cloudless sky, held in that delicious warmth like water in a simmering kettle, like the roots of a sapling wrapped tightly in burlap to keep them from freezing, like a baby bird nestled in a handful of fluff and feathers and woven grasses.

The rain is not to be a drenching, more a sprinkling, a quick succession of light showers that will water all the green growing things, a sweep of the sky hose, just enough. The sun will reappear, the last of the ice beneath the pile of wood chips wanting spreading will melt, the earth will smell rich and brown when I turn it over with my pitchfork. I will haul load after load of chicken manure-rich dirt to fill the boxes and I will stop often to sip sweet tea and gaze over my small domain, noting with pure pleasure the symmetry and rightness of all I survey.

I will say with Dame Julian of Norwich, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

Filling the garden beds.