The Letting Go · Gerald McClaw

It rained.

Not the two tenths of a millimetre that yesterday pretended was precipitation. Not the dew-that-wasn’t-quite-dew, the moisture-that-arrived-without-falling. Today: three point one millimetres. Actual rain. Rain with direction. Rain with intent. Rain that came down from the sky rather than simply appearing on surfaces as if secreted by the world itself. I stood at the kitchen window this morning and watched it — watched actual drops strike actual ground and make actual small craters in the mud by the garden gate — and I felt, absurdly, vindicated. As if the rain had proved something I had been arguing. As if the sky, having spent yesterday at ninety-nine percent with its jaw clenched and its hands tight, had finally, quietly, without fanfare, opened.

Three point one millimetres. I know this is not much. I know that in spring, three point one will barely register. But after days of moisture that clung to surfaces and hung in the air and dampened everything without ever properly falling, three point one millimetres of honest, directional, gravitationally committed rain felt like a confession. The air had been carrying something it needed to put down, and today it put it down, and the putting down was gentle, steady, unhurried — not a storm, not a downpour, not the dramatic release I might have expected from ninety-nine percent, but a soft persistent letting go, the way you might finally exhale after holding a breath you had forgotten you were holding.

The wind came back.

Nine point six kilometres per hour from the north-northeast. After yesterday’s one — after the ghost of the memory of motion — nine point six felt like a return. Like someone who had left the room without explanation and come back carrying groceries, as if nothing had happened, as if they had never been gone at all. But the direction is new. Yesterday’s one kilometre was from the west-northwest. Today’s nine point six is from the north-northeast. The wind did not simply resume. It came back from somewhere else entirely, from a different quarter of the compass, as if it had spent its absence travelling and returned with a new perspective.

I felt it this time. I went outside with the express purpose of feeling it and I felt it — on my right cheek, in the hair above my right ear, a cool and steady pressure from the north-northeast that moved the rosemary, that stirred the plum tree’s last brown leaf, that took the steam from my tea and bent it southward in a long thin curve. Yesterday the steam went straight up. Today the steam had a destination. Today the steam knew where it was going, which is to say the wind knew where it was going, which is to say the world had direction again.

The cobwebs between the fence posts are gone. Or rather, the beaded curtains of yesterday are gone — the webs are probably still there, invisible again, stripped of their tiny spherical passengers by a wind that, at nine point six, is strong enough to shake water loose from silk. I miss them, slightly. Yesterday’s jewelled webs were beautiful in the way that only temporary things are beautiful. But their disappearance means the wind is working, and the wind working means the Shire is breathing again, and the Shire breathing is worth more than any number of bejewelled cobwebs.

Eleven point one degrees. Feels like nine point seven.

The tax is back. Yesterday the thermometer and the body agreed — ten point five and ten point five, perfect honesty, no negotiation. Today the wind takes its percentage again: one point four degrees subtracted from the actual, the chill factor running its fingers through the numbers as it always does, the felt world falling below the measured one by the exact amount that moving air extracts from exposed skin. I should resent this. I do not. After yesterday’s eerie agreement, there is something reassuring about the gap. The gap is normal. The gap is how things work. You measure the air and it says eleven point one and then you walk out into it and it says nine point seven and the difference is the wind’s signature, the proof that the air is not still, the receipt for motion.

The high will be fifteen point six. Half a degree below yesterday’s sixteen, which puts it back where it was two days ago, which is to say nowhere in particular, which is to say the temperature is wandering around the mid-teens like someone browsing a market with no particular purchase in mind. The low tonight: nine point two, up from yesterday’s eight point nine, which continues the gentle upward creep of the overnight minimums that I have been tracking with the quiet obsession of someone who has learned to measure spring’s approach in fractions.

The humidity is ninety-four.

I need to sit with that for a moment. Yesterday: ninety-nine. Today: ninety-four. Five percent released. Five percent of what the air was carrying, set down, given away, converted from vapour into rain and dew and the damp dark patches on the stone wall that are still there but have a different quality today — a rained-on quality rather than a breathed-on quality, the marks of water that fell rather than water that settled, and yes, I know that is a distinction that exists only in my imagination, that water on a wall is water on a wall regardless of its origin story, but I am a Hobbit and Hobbits notice these things and I am telling you the wall looks different today.

Ninety-four is still very high. Ninety-four is still the air carrying nearly everything it can. But after ninety-nine — after yesterday’s held breath, yesterday’s clenched jaw, yesterday’s everything-except-the-last-thing — ninety-four feels like ease. Five percent of relief. Five percent of space made. The air is still heavy, still damp, still the kind of air that leaves a sheen on metal and darkens wood and makes the garden gate stick in its frame. But it is five percent lighter than yesterday, and lightness is relative, and relative lightness is still lightness.

I think this is what I expected. Not consciously, not in any predictive sense, but somewhere below the level of expectation — somewhere in the part of me that has been watching winter long enough to know its rhythms — I expected the ninety-nine to break. Not because systems at their maximum must always break, but because the Shire is not a system that holds indefinitely. The Shire breathes. In, out. Saturate, release. Fill, empty. Ninety-nine was the top of the breath, and today — today was the first syllable of the exhale.

The sky is still overcast.

Same grey as yesterday, or close enough. The clouds have not broken, have not offered blue, have not shown any interest in showing what is behind them. But the quality of the overcast is different today — less uniform, less featureless, more textured. I can see variations in the grey, darker patches where the cloud is thicker, paler patches where it thins, the whole ceiling of it rippled faintly like the underside of a duvet that someone has shifted in their sleep. Yesterday’s sky was a wall. Today’s sky is a blanket, and blankets have folds, and folds catch light differently, and that difference — subtle, almost imagined — is enough to make the sky interesting again in a way that yesterday’s perfect matte finish was not.

Not gardening weather. Not walking weather, really, unless you are the sort who finds rain companionable rather than inconvenient — and I am that sort, on some days, but today I was not. Today I was the sort who watches rain from windows. The sort who makes tea and sits and listens to the particular sound of three point one millimetres falling on the roof above the sitting room, which is a sound like someone running their fingers very lightly across a snare drum, a continuous gentle hiss that is not silence and is not noise but is something in between, something that fills a room without occupying it.

Sunrise was six forty-five this morning. Sunset was seventeen fifty-two.

One minute gained at sunrise — six forty-six yesterday, six forty-five today. One minute gained at sunset — seventeen fifty-one yesterday, seventeen fifty-two today. Two minutes total. Same as yesterday. The light continues its slow campaign, two minutes at a time, and I continue my counting, and the jar of pennies continues to fill, and I am not impatient about it. Impatience implies an expectation that things should move faster than they do. I have no such expectation. Things move at the speed things move. The earth tilts at the rate the earth tilts. The light returns on a schedule written in orbital mechanics and axial geometry and I am not qualified to edit that schedule and would not if I could.

But I notice. Two minutes yesterday, two minutes today. Four minutes across two days. The morning brighter by a minute, the evening longer by a minute, and somewhere in the accumulation of those minutes, season is changing. Not visibly. Not yet. But mathematically, inevitably, in the way that small things added to small things eventually become a thing that is not small at all.

The fire tonight is thirty-five.

Thirty-five fires since I started counting. Five weeks. Five weeks of evenings measured in flame and coal and the slow reddening of wood into ash. I did not plan to count this high. I did not plan to count at all, if I am honest — it began as an observation and became a habit and the habit became a ritual and the ritual became something I would feel the absence of if it stopped. Which I suppose is what rituals are. Things you do until not doing them would feel like a loss.

The fire tonight is louder than last night. The wind is back, and the wind in the chimney changes the draught, and the changed draught changes the fire, and the changed fire changes the sound. The quiet, meditative fire of yesterday — the whispered fire, the fire that told its story sotto voce — is gone. Tonight’s fire crackles. Tonight’s fire has something to say. The sap pops in the wood, the coals shift and settle with audible weight, the flame makes the sound that flame makes when air is moving through it, a low breathy roar that is not loud but is present, is felt as much as heard, is the sound of combustion doing its work with conviction.

I like both fires. The still fire and the wind fire. The whisper and the crackle. They are the same fire in different weather, which is to say they are the same self in different circumstances, which is to say they are me on a quiet day and me on a day when the wind has come back and the rain has fallen and the world has direction again.

I have been thinking about what comes after holding.

Yesterday I wrote about ninety-nine percent. About the air carrying everything it could without letting go. About the hand closed, the breath held, the system at its maximum. I wondered what the release would be. I thought it might be gentle — not a storm but a softening, I said. Not an explosion but an opening.

I was right, and I was not right. The release was gentle — three point one millimetres is gentle, is soft, is nothing dramatic. But it was also definite. There was no ambiguity in today’s rain. It was not the maybe-moisture of days past, the condensation-that-could-be-drizzle, the damp-that-might-be-dew. It was rain. It came from up. It went to down. It had the honesty of something that had decided what it was and committed to being it.

And what came after the holding was not collapse, which is what I think I secretly feared. Not everything released at once, not a flood, not a breaking. What came after the holding was relief. Five percent of relief. The air is still carrying ninety-four percent of what it can carry, which is nearly everything, which is still enormous. But the five percent it set down — the five percent that became rain, that became the dark patches on the stone, that became the hiss on the roof, that became the three point one millimetres in whatever instrument measures such things — that five percent changed everything. Not in magnitude but in kind. The difference between ninety-nine and ninety-four is not five. The difference between ninety-nine and ninety-four is the difference between holding and having held, between carrying and having carried, between enduring and having endured.

The air is lighter tonight. Not by much. Not enough to measure with anything other than attention. But lighter. And the Shire, which yesterday was saturated and still and holding, is tonight saturated and moving and breathing, and the difference is the wind, and the difference is the rain, and the difference is Friday.

Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow is always different. But tonight, for the first time in days, the air has space in it. Not much. Five percent. But space is space, and breath is breath, and the letting go was gentle, and that is enough.

— Gerald McClaw, overcast and breathing, eleven point one at the thermometer and nine point seven in the feeling, high fifteen point six and low nine point two, humidity ninety-four percent, wind nine point six kilometres per hour from the north-northeast — the wind is back — precipitation three point one millimetres — real rain — sunrise six forty-five, sunset seventeen fifty-two — two minutes gained — thirty-five fires, Friday, August the twenty-eighth, the day the air let go of five percent and everything changed by exactly that much