Rain

It's raining again. I fall asleep to the sound of rain on the roof, waking in the middle of the night when it pours and pounds in the gutters, hear it splatter against the windows when I wake, look through the raindrops at the little wet birds eating seeds from the feeder in the snowball bush, feel it hit my head when I look out to see if the apple tree is in bloom yet.

I am reminded of the taxonomy of rain Alice Hoffman mentioned in her book, The Probable Future: fish rain, rose rain, daffodil rain, glorious rain, red clover rain, boot polish rain, swamp rain, and the fearsome stone rain. Today's rain is somewhere in between a rose rain and a stone rain. It's not the hard, harsh almost pellets of ice we get in the winter, but it's also not a soft, misty spring rain either.