The stillness of approaching weather sat about little farm yesterday. The clouds had slowly lowered about our heads like a tin lid, amplifying all the darkening sounds and tricking the crickets into early song. The birds gathered in heavy trees and went quiet. The big animals ate as fast as they could. Filling their bellies in case of a protracted pause.
It was calm. Eeerie almost. Though pleasant. We felt small and alone in the fields, the animals and I. But safe. Our day was good.
When the rain finally began we heard it approaching from far away through the corn.
Everyone’s heads go up, smelling the shower, imagining we might have heard something, shelter is noted. We sense the hundreds of miles of crops this band of rain has trailed its fingers across until reaching us. Snippets of stories it has seen. All middles with no endings. Wild eyes with no words. As it blows its cloudy urgent body through the countryside. Just on the other side of the field now, pushing through the leaves towards us. The approaching sound of the petals of raindrops hitting the drying leaves of the corn has a pittering sound, like a million boots tiptoeing on gravel, toe to heel, toe to heel. A barely heard rustle now that grows in volume, rushing towards us, announcing its sound, building its volume, pushing the wind ahead like a train in a hot tunnel, ruffling our hair and tails as a warning. Before finally the raindrops burst out of the wall wall of corn, and into our fields zig zagging across to find us and rain generously upon our heads.
It only rained for a short time but the rain in the corn is a different sound from rain on the green grass. Or rain on a tin roof. Or rain tapping the top of your hat. Or rain hitting the drying wash on the clothesline. Rain in drying corn has a playful timbre, it is a collection of slipping notes. As the shower moves across, then above and then beyond us the sounds change like a passing car, dropping a note, changing down a gear, trailing a descant of drips and piddles as we hear it entering the next field and rushing away. And though our feet are wet, we shake our hands and ears dry. Heads go back down in the fields. Mouths reach for washed clover. Tails switch. I pick up my thistle spade again and come out from under the colander eaves of the barn. Birds peer skywards through the leaves testing the air and the tin lid rises and floats off after the gamboling shower. A benevolent uncle of a cloud lumbering behind his charges.
Good morning. I hope you all have a lovely day. We might even get another shower, the sky is red in its dawn.
Your friend on the farm, celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
46 responses to “The Rustle of a Rain Shower”
This is a chapter of a book, or the beginning of a novel, right? What lovely imagery you paint with your words, of all things about a storm! My morning starts out just right. Very happy now somehow! 🙂
Good morning, just like me a little shower of rain makes you happy. Us gardeners are like that!! c
Now I want to live in a flat land where I can hear the approaching rain on the fields of corn! (just not GM sprayed corn) 😉 Lucky girl to have that experience. There was a massive shower here in Vancouver yesterday evening and rain all thru the night and it was prefaced with that misty calm. About all I could hear were the fog horns carrying up the mountains.
It in only here that I have ever heard it and I try every year to put it into words. It is one of the magical moments out here.. Love your fog horns. I was weaving your fog horn into a sentence when i was feeding the chicks in the field this morning. But these sentences we write when we are thinking and humming and talking to the animals are like wisps of smoke, I should carry a notebook again i think.. c
We must be like Ruth Stone who heard the poem coming to her over the field like the rain and ran like hell ahead of it to get to the house and pencil and paper to capture it before it passed her by. 🙂
It has been a while since I have heard the fog horns…I grew up in New England on the coast and it was a comforting sound. 🙂
Thank you for this glorious prose poem of a post.
Love,
ViVx
and thank you for such high praise from a real poet.. c
Beautiful written….I could smell the rain and feel it on my face as I sit here wishing we were getting your rain. 🙂
I hope you get some rain too Mere.. c
We got glorious needed rain this weekend. Glorious.
And it washed away all those Fall feelings, didn’t it? I hope.. c
Beautiful words Celi – I could ‘feel’ the rain coming just by reading. The house I used to live in before my divorce was situated in the open fields of five acres, right at the base of the Peaks Of Otter (Blue Ridge Mountains) and you could literally SEE the rain or snow coming from miles away as it slid down the mountain side. We even got small clouds drifting slowly past the kitchen windows some times, that is how high up we were. I miss that house – but still love my little cottage.
Oh my I would miss that too, seeing the clouds slide down and hide the mountains as they approached. It sounds other worldly.. but the cottage you are in now does look awfully sweet, thank goodness you have a verandah! c
Refreshing 😉
Exactly! morning mad.. c
Such poetic, lovely description! Beautiful. My only experience that’s close to this happens at the beach. I love to watch clouds build out over the Gulf, and as they move closer in, a dark blue-gray wall of rain intensifies and moves in, and it really is like a moving wall with a clean edge and you don’t feel the rain as gradually as this, but more “all at once” when it hits.
very visual when you see a storm coming across the sea, I grew up on a beach .. literally.. and from the second story lounge we would sit and watch the weather roll across the bay. We would curl up, our knees under our chins, hidden in big over stuffed chairs and just watch out the big windows for hours it seems. Thank you for that memory.. c
Ah, I see the corn fields in the background of your photos … miss this time of year in Nebraska, the state I grew up in! I’m headed to the Oklahome State Fair today with friends. It’s supposed to rain! LOL It’ll be welcome and I am quite sure I won’t melt!
Yes the corn is changing, heaving gold about the place..have a great day at the fair.. c
You describe the rain so well I can hear it from here…
Beautiful. You capture it all perfectly. Thank you. I feel refreshed.
You have such a gift for words. I couild really feel and hear that rain through your lovely description !! Thank you for sharing your rain shower with us, here in Texas, no rain, so hearing about yours is just wonderful !!!
I do hope you get rain soon, does it usually come at the end of the summer? c
Something exotic about a September rain storm…especially one traveling across the plains and rustling the late corn fields and you describe it so perfectly, one can almost hear and see it! We were gathering oysters in the Sound yesterday morning and a rain storm gathered in the distant mountains and slowly approached us…it is a wonderful thing to be able to see it coming from so far off, on land or water! To hear a million drops on the shells and stones on the beach might have a similar song! 🙂
Good Day Celi; well said; like a flowing river of cascading channels of words drifting from each flowering description!! such a way with words. be a blessing mike
I’m sharing this with next group of writers at my 6 week Courage to Write Class. I tell them, more when they are beginning, to avoid “ings,” and that is advice tossed around a great deal, but I want to show them also how well your writing uses this process. Your writing is sooo good.