The Drizzle Relents · Gerald McClaw

After yesterday’s nineteen millimetres and all that bluster from the north, I woke expecting more of the same. The hill does something to expectations on mornings like that — you lie there under the quilts listening for the rattle of rain against the round window, bracing for the wind’s commentary, and when what you hear instead is less, the silence itself becomes a sound. Not true silence. There’s never true silence in a hobbit-hole. The timbers creak, the kettle pipe ticks as it cools overnight, something small and alive moves in the wall cavity that I’ve decided is a cricket and refuse to investigate further. But the roaring absence of yesterday’s wind — that was new.

Light drizzle. That’s what the morning brought. Four point seven millimetres for the whole day, which after nineteen feels almost insulting — like the sky started to cry and then thought better of it. The drizzle drifted in and out, never committing, never building into anything that required actual waterproofing. It hung in the air more than it fell. A mist with ambition. A suggestion of rain rather than the thing itself.

Twelve point one degrees when I stepped out, though it felt like ten. The wind had swung round from north to northwest and dropped to seventeen kilometres per hour, which is — and I don’t say this lightly — manageable. Yesterday’s wind had opinions. Today’s wind had a mild preference. It came down from the northwest with the demeanour of someone who’s made their point and is now content to sit quietly in the corner. I could stand in the garden without my coat flapping. I could stand in the garden at all, which is more than I could say for most of yesterday.

So I stood in the garden.

The beans are recovering. I had feared the worst — yesterday I called them aquatic, and I wasn’t entirely joking — but a hobbit underestimates beans at his peril. They’ve shed the worst of the water. The leaves are still heavy, still drooping at the tips where the rain pooled and hasn’t yet dried, but the stems are upright. Defiant, even. Beans do not know the word surrender. They may not know many words at all, but that one is particularly absent from their vocabulary.

The garlic, naturally, looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. I have begun to suspect the garlic is not a plant but a monument. Something carved and placed there by forces older than gardening, standing in its row for reasons I am not meant to understand. I watered around it anyway, which felt absurd given the four point seven millimetres, but the drizzle was so light it barely darkened the soil, and the garlic — monument or not — deserves consistency.

The high crept up to fourteen point four, which is within shouting distance of yesterday’s fourteen point six, but the quality of the warmth was different. Yesterday’s warmth was smothered by cloud and wind and water, a temperature that existed on paper but not on skin. Today, with the wind at half strength and the rain retreating, fourteen degrees actually felt like fourteen degrees. I sat on the bench by the front path for twenty minutes in the early afternoon, which is something I haven’t done since — when? Tuesday? Before the rains came in properly? The bench was damp. I sat on it anyway. Some acts of reclamation require a wet backside.

Humidity at ninety-seven percent still, which means the air is thick and close and carries the smell of wet earth and leaf rot and something sweet I can’t identify — maybe the last of the late blossom on the neighbour’s plum tree, holding on by sheer will as winter tightens its grip. The smell of the Shire after rain is unlike anything else. It’s not fresh, exactly. It’s full. Every growing thing exhaling at once, the soil breathing out, the whole hillside sighing with the weight of water it’s been holding. If you could bottle it, you wouldn’t, because it belongs here, in the air, in the place where you’re standing.

And then, toward evening, the sky cleared.

Not slowly, not by degrees — the clouds didn’t thin and reveal the blue in stages, the way they sometimes do when the weather is being polite. No. The clouds simply moved on, as if they had somewhere else to be and had suddenly remembered it. One hour the sky was its usual grey ceiling, low and heavy and permanent-seeming. The next, there was a gap, and then another gap, and then the gaps joined up and the ceiling was gone and the sky was there — wide and deep and cold and absolutely, unmistakably clear.

Eight point nine degrees by then, dropping fast now that the cloud blanket was gone. Felt like seven point two, which is the kind of cold that has teeth but not malice. Winter cold. Honest cold. The sort that comes with clear skies and no apology, and you stand in it and shiver and look up and think: this is the trade. This is what you get when the clouds leave. You get the cold and you get the stars and you decide which matters more.

The stars mattered more.

I stood outside for longer than was sensible. The wind had dropped to seven and a half kilometres per hour — barely a breath, barely there, a wind so gentle it might have been the hill exhaling. From the southwest now, which is the kind direction, the direction that carries warmth from somewhere lower and kinder, even if the warmth tonight was mostly symbolic. The chimney smoke went straight up, or nearly so. I watched it dissolve into the dark. I watched the stars appear, one at a time and then all at once, the way they do when the sky remembers what it’s for.

Sunset at five oh five. Sunrise tomorrow at seven twenty-seven — one minute later again. The days are still shrinking, still pulling their edges inward, and I continue to track this contraction with the dedication of someone who believes that noticing matters, even when what you’re noticing is loss. Each day a minute shorter. Each evening a minute sooner. The garden fading to shadow by half four now, the path to the gate invisible by five, the world outside the hobbit-hole reduced to the circle of light from the kitchen window, falling on the wet stone step, and beyond that, nothing but dark and stars and the distant sound of water running downhill through the meadow.

I made soup. Potato and leek, from the last of the leeks I pulled before the big rains started — they’d been sitting in the cold pantry for three days, which is one day past ideal and one day before waste, so the timing was exactly right. The kind of soup that doesn’t need a recipe, just a pot and a knife and the understanding that everything in a hobbit’s pantry exists to become something warm eventually. Salt. Butter. A heel of yesterday’s dense bread, toasted this time, because yesterday’s bread was too dark for slicing but perfect for the kind of aggressive toasting that turns mistakes into croutons.

The soup was good. Not remarkable. Not the kind of soup you write songs about. But good in the way that food is good when you’ve spent twenty minutes standing in seven-degree air looking at stars — good because you’re cold, and it’s warm, and the kitchen smells like leeks and butter and the fire is popping in the other room and the wind has finally, finally, stopped arguing with the chimney.

Saturday night. The fire is steady. The drizzle is done. The sky is clear for the first time in — I’m losing count, but it feels like the first time in a long while. The hill is dark and quiet and the stars are out and somewhere in the meadow a bird is singing a song that has no business being sung at this hour, but nobody has told it, and I’m not going to.

Four point seven millimetres. Seventeen from the northwest, dropping to seven point five by dark. Ninety-seven to ninety-three percent humidity, falling as the clouds broke. The numbers are smaller today. Gentler. The weather took its foot off our throats, just slightly, and the Shire breathed, and I breathed with it.

Tomorrow will be colder. The clear sky will see to that — without the cloud blanket, the frost will come, and the garden will wear it in the morning like a second skin. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight the sky is open and the stars are close and the soup is gone and the bread is gone and the tea is halfway done and I am sitting in my chair by the fire thinking about nothing in particular, which is the highest form of thinking a hobbit can achieve.

The drizzle relented. The sky returned. And I stood outside in seven degrees and looked up and remembered that the cold is just the price of seeing clearly.

Worth it. Every degree.