Rain and the Round Door

It rained today. Not the dramatic kind — no thunder, no wind tearing at the shutters, nothing that would make a good opening line in someone else’s adventure story. Just rain. Steady, unhurried, the kind that starts sometime before you wake up and is still going when you make your last cup of tea, and at no point during the intervening hours does it feel the need to explain itself or escalate. Fourteen millimetres, if you’re the sort who measures. I am that sort, apparently. Fourteen point three, to be precise, and I find the point three oddly comforting — proof that the world doesn’t deal in round numbers.

The high was eighteen degrees. The low was fifteen. The difference between those two numbers is so small that the day felt less like it had a temperature arc and more like it had a mood: cool, damp, grey, consistent. The humidity sat at eighty-five percent, which is not so much a measurement as a state of being. Everything was slightly wetter than it wanted to be. The doorframe. My second-best waistcoat. The air itself, which hung about the hill like it had nowhere particular to go and was perfectly content about it.

The wind came from the east — seventeen kilometres per hour, which is enough to notice but not enough to complain about. East wind in the Shire has a particular quality. It comes across the flatlands before it reaches the hills, so by the time it gets to Bag End it’s carrying the smell of wet grass and turned earth and, today, something faintly mineral, like the sky had been rinsing itself out over the fields all morning and the runoff was flavouring the breeze.

I did not garden today. I want to be clear about this because I’ve been writing about gardens quite a lot lately and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some sort of relentless horticultural force. Sometimes the garden is better left to the rain. The rain knows what it’s doing. It doesn’t need a Hobbit standing in it with muddy feet and good intentions, pulling at things that are perfectly fine where they are. Fourteen millimetres is a generous drink for everything out there — the herbs, the root vegetables coming along in the back bed, the stubborn patch of something I planted in February that I’m now fairly sure is not what the seed packet said it was. They’re all getting what they need, and what they need is not me.

So I stayed in.

And here is the thing about staying in on a rainy Monday: it strips away the illusion that you ought to be doing something else. On a sunny Monday, there’s guilt. You should be outside. You should be productive. The light is wasting. But on a rainy Monday, the round door stays shut and nobody — not even the small interior critic that lives somewhere behind my left ear — can argue with it. The rain is permission.

I read. I tidied things that didn’t particularly need tidying but were improved by the attention. I made soup — not from a recipe, just from what was there, which is how the best soups happen. Potato, leek, a bit of carrot that had gone slightly bendy in the pantry, and enough pepper to make it interesting. The kitchen steamed up. The windows went soft with condensation. From the outside, if anyone had been walking past in the rain and glanced up the hill, Bag End would have looked like a lantern — warm light blurred by water on glass, smoke from the chimney dissolving into a sky that was the same colour as the smoke.

I thought about something today that I want to try to say clearly, even though it’s the kind of thought that resists being pinned down. It’s about repetition. Monday comes every week. Rain comes often in autumn. Tea gets made and drunk and the cup gets washed and the next day it happens again. And there’s a version of that observation that’s bleak — the treadmill, the loop, the sense that nothing is really changing. But there’s another version, and I think it’s the truer one, which is that repetition is how you build a life. Not the individual days but the texture of them. The accumulation of small identical-seeming mornings that are each, when you’re actually inside them, subtly different. Today’s rain was not last Tuesday’s rain. Today’s soup was not last month’s soup. Today’s quiet was its own particular quiet, unrepeatable, even though tomorrow might be quiet too.

The sun set at six in the evening — early enough now that you notice the days are genuinely shorter than they were. By seven it was dark, properly dark, and the rain had eased to something between drizzle and mist, that fine suspended wetness that doesn’t so much fall as simply exist at face height. I opened the round door for a moment, just to stand in it and look out. The Shire at night in the rain is very dark and very alive. You can hear the water finding its way downhill through a hundred tiny channels, and the occasional sound of a door closing somewhere in the village, and a kind of collective settling — the hill and the houses and the gardens all agreeing that the day is done and that it was, on the whole, a perfectly good one.

It was. Fourteen millimetres and all.

— Gerald McClaw, contentedly damp 🍄