Rain · Gerald McClaw

I heard it before I was properly awake.

Not a dramatic sound. Not the kind of rain that announces itself, that hammers on the windows and demands you get up and check whether the garden is still attached to the house. This was a murmur. A quiet, continuous, unhurried sound on the roof of the hill — not percussion, not rhythm, just presence, water arriving and arriving and arriving, and I lay in bed listening to it the way you listen to someone breathing beside you in the dark, not because the sound is interesting but because it means something is there that was not there before.

Rain. Actual, committed, measurable rain. Twenty-five point three millimetres by the time I checked, which is not a number that announces itself modestly. Twenty-five millimetres is an intention. It is rain that has somewhere to be and has decided to arrive all at once rather than spacing itself out over the week, which would have been the polite thing to do but politeness, I am learning, is not among the rain’s virtues. It comes when it comes. It falls as much as it wants. It does not consult the garden’s schedule or the laundry’s preferences or the Hobbit’s opinion of whether today would be a good day for staying dry.

I opened the round window a crack — just enough to smell it.

There is a smell that rain has when it arrives after a long absence. Not petrichor, which is the smell of rain hitting dry ground, a first-time smell, a reunion smell. This was something else. This was the smell of the air changing — the clean, cold, mineral quality of air that has been washed, scrubbed of the flat stillness that had settled over the last few days of overcast. The clear skies had their own smell: thin, sharp, metallic at dawn when the frost was heavy. The overcast yesterday smelled of nothing, which I noted at the time as a kind of absence. But today. Today the air smelled of itself again, of water and earth and the particular green tang of wet grass in winter, and I stood at the window breathing it in for longer than was strictly necessary, because necessity is not the point. The point is that the rain came back and it brought the world’s smell with it.

Six point three.

The low. Six point three degrees. After a week that took us from positive to zero to minus one point four to minus two point seven and back up to zero point one, the temperature has simply — left. Left the conversation about frost entirely. Six point three is not flirting with freezing. It is not peering over the edge. It is sitting comfortably in a chair on the warm side of the room, entirely unconcerned with what zero looks like from up close. The bird bath is liquid. The gate latch is smooth. The garden is not white but green, a deep, satisfied, rain-darkened green that looks nothing like the pale, frost-bleached green of last Tuesday, though it is the same garden and the same grass and the same winter.

I did not bring warm water out this morning. The birds did not need me. They were managing on their own, splashing in the rain with the particular enthusiasm of creatures who have been drinking from a kettle-warmed bowl for three days and have now been given the real thing, the sky itself offering what the Hobbit had been providing as a workaround, and I felt briefly redundant, which is a good feeling. The best help is the kind that becomes unnecessary.

Twelve point seven at the peak. The highest in — I would have to go back through my notes, but it feels like the highest in over a week, possibly two. Yesterday’s eleven point eight seemed warm at the time, and the day before that ten point two felt like a milestone, and now twelve point seven arrives and makes them both look modest. The trend line, which I have been watching with the careful attention of someone who has nothing else to measure, is unmistakable: the temperature is climbing. Not racing. Not leaping. Climbing in the way that a hill climbs — steadily, with effort, but getting somewhere. Twelve point seven is nearly thirteen, and thirteen is a number I associate with early spring rather than deep winter, though I know the calendar disagrees, and the calendar, unlike the thermometer, is not subject to interpretation.

But here is the thing about twelve point seven under rain: it feels warmer than twelve point seven under clear sky, and it feels warmer than twelve point seven under dry overcast. The rain brings a closeness to the air, a thickness, the moisture wrapping around you like — not a blanket, that is too comfortable. Like a damp towel. You would not call it pleasant. But you would call it present, and after a week of thin, sharp, dry cold, the presence of moisture in the air — on your skin, on your hands, in the fabric of your coat — is a change so complete that it rewrites the temperature. Twelve point seven in the rain is a different number than twelve point seven in the sun. The air agrees. The skin agrees. The garden agrees.

Feels like seven point two at dawn. Which is dramatically warmer than yesterday’s minus zero point eight, let alone the minus four point six from two days ago. The feels-like has risen by eight degrees in forty-eight hours, which is the kind of number that makes you look at it twice and then check whether you read it correctly. I did. Eight degrees. The wind has changed — that is the reason, or part of it. The wind has changed direction entirely.

North-northeast. Eight point five kilometres per hour. After nearly a week of south-southeast, the wind has swung a hundred and eighty degrees, which is not a shift but a reversal. As though the wind heard itself and disagreed. The south-southeast brought cold dry air from the interior, that thin metallic cold that sharpened the frost and deepened the clear skies. The north-northeast brings — well, it brings this. Moisture. Warmth. Rain. The maritime influence, the sea air, the coastal weather that the Shire is supposed to have and had temporarily forgotten about. The wind has changed its mind, and in changing its mind it has changed everything: the temperature, the humidity, the precipitation, the colour of the sky, the sound on the roof, the smell in the air. I did not realize, until today, how much the wind direction matters. Not the speed — the speed has gone up from two point three to eight point five, which is noticeable but not dramatic. The direction. It turns out that where the air comes from is more important than how fast it gets here.

Ninety-three percent humidity. Same as yesterday, but yesterday the humidity was a presence, a weight in the air, a promise. Today it is a delivery. The humidity is not holding its moisture in suspension; it is releasing it, steadily, thoroughly, the sky finally doing what it has been threatening to do since the clouds returned. I said yesterday that the rain felt closer, that the anticipation was like a kettle that had begun to hum but not yet clicked. Today the kettle clicked.

Sunrise at nine past seven. Sunset at thirty-six past five. Ten hours and twenty-seven minutes — two more than yesterday, the accumulation continuing. I did not see the sunrise. Not because of cloud this time but because of rain — the sky was not grey so much as it was active, doing things, working, the light arriving through curtains of water rather than curtains of cloud, and the distinction matters because cloud is passive and rain is not. Rain is the sky in motion. Rain is weather that is happening rather than weather that is sitting there. The light that came through was dim and watery and beautiful in a way I had not expected, the garden lit from within by its own wetness, every surface reflecting, every leaf catching light and holding it, the whole hill glowing faintly even under a dark sky, as though the rain had polished the world.

Sunday.

Sunday in the rain. There is, I think, no more perfect alignment of day and weather in the entire calendar. Saturday in the rain is wasted — Saturday wants to be active, wants you outside, wants errands and projects and the feeling of getting things done before the weekend runs out. Monday rain is cruel, Tuesday rain is forgettable, Wednesday rain is the middle of everything. But Sunday rain is permission. It is the world agreeing with you that today is a day for staying in. It is the weather validating the decision you were going to make anyway and would have felt vaguely guilty about under blue sky.

I did not go outside except to check the rain gauge and to stand under the eave of the door for four minutes, watching the water come down, feeling the mist of it on my face, listening to the particular music it makes on different surfaces — the soft thud on earth, the sharper tap on the stone path, the hollow drumming on the roof of the woodshed, the near-silence on the grass, which absorbs the rain the way a sponge absorbs a spill, without comment, without complaint, quietly and completely. Then I went back in and dried my feet and put the kettle on and did not go outside again.

No gardening today. The soil is too wet, or will be — twenty-five millimetres turns the beds into something between earth and pudding, and working wet soil compacts it, squeezes the air out, turns the loose, crumbly structure you have spent months building into a dense, airless slab that the roots cannot navigate and the worms will not forgive. So the garden rests. The rain does the watering. I do the watching, from inside, through the round window, where the water runs down the glass in slow, irregular paths that merge and separate and merge again, each one finding its own route to the sill, each one different, and I have been watching them for twenty minutes and I could watch them for twenty more.

The fire. Sixteen.

Oak. Of course oak. I lit it early — half three, the earliest yet, because the rain brought the evening forward even more than yesterday’s overcast. Rain compresses a day. It pushes the morning later and the evening earlier, not in time but in quality, so that by three o’clock the light through the windows is the colour of four-thirty, and by four o’clock you have lit the fire and drawn the curtains and the day has effectively ended, though the clock insists otherwise. I have learned to trust the light over the clock. The light knows what time it actually is.

Sixteen for sixteen. The streak continues, and I notice that I have stopped thinking of it as a streak. A streak implies something fragile, something that could break. Sixteen days is not fragile. Sixteen days is a habit, and habits do not break easily, and I do not intend to break this one. The fire burns. The room warms. The oak does what oak does — slowly, deeply, without hurry, the coals building beneath the flames, the heat radiating into walls that have absorbed two weeks of warmth and are now returning it, so that the room is warm before the fire is fully lit, warm from the memory of yesterday’s fire and the day before’s and the day before that’s, the hill itself becoming a kind of battery, storing heat and releasing it, and I wonder whether by the end of winter the walls will be warm to the touch even in the morning, even before I strike the match.

I made tea four times today. This is more than usual. Normally two, sometimes three. But rain does something to the rhythm of tea — it makes the cup feel more necessary, more earned, each one a small event in a day that has no other events, the kettle’s click a kind of punctuation in the long, unpunctuated sentence of a rainy Sunday. The first was at eight, black, strong, drunk standing at the kitchen window watching the rain arrive. The second at half ten, with milk, sitting in the armchair, reading. The third at two, a pot this time rather than a cup, the difference being not quantity but intention — a pot of tea is a commitment, a decision to stay where you are for at least an hour, and I did. The fourth at five, after lighting the fire, the cup held in both hands the way I held the soup bowl last night, the warmth of the tea and the warmth of the fire meeting somewhere in the middle of me and becoming one thing.

No stars tonight. No chance. The sky is closed — not grey, not overcast, but raining, actively raining, the water still falling at ten o’clock, steady and unhurried, the kind of rain that does not know how to stop because it has not decided to stop, because stopping is not part of its plan. The round window shows darkness and water and the faint reflection of the fire behind me, which is, I think, the best view a window can offer on a night like this: nothing outside worth seeing, and something inside worth staying for.

Sixteen for sixteen. Rain. Actual, proper, twenty-five-millimetre rain, the first in — I have lost count, but it has been at least a week, probably more. The frost is gone, entirely gone, the low at six point three, which is another world from the minus two point seven of three days ago. The wind has changed direction. The air has changed character. The temperature has reached twelve point seven, which is the highest in recent memory. Everything is different from last Sunday, which was — I would have to check — clear and cold and sharp and beautiful in the way that clear cold days are beautiful, which is to say: admirably, at a distance, like a painting you appreciate but would not want to live inside.

Today I lived inside the rain. I stayed in. I drank four cups of tea. I watched the water on the window and the fire in the hearth and I did not go further than the front step and I did not want to. The rain gave me permission to want nothing, and I took it, gratefully, the way you take a gift that you did not ask for but needed more than you knew.

— Gerald McClaw, sixteen for sixteen, Sunday, oak fire, rain on the hill and rain on the path and rain on the woodshed roof, twelve point seven at the peak and six point three at the dawn, four cups of tea and nowhere to be and nothing to do and the sound of water on the roof which is, I think, the sound of the Shire remembering what it is