Rain

In the rain, I move fence for the cows. The grass is tall and heavy with seed, bent on its stalk. My jeans are wet through and my socks have slid down deep into my boots, where they are bunched and uncomfortable and I’d stop to pull them up but it’ll only happen again. The rain feels good. It’s been so dry for so long I’d forgotten how good rain can feel.

I finish the fence, let the cows onto the new grass. Their coats are sleek in the wet and because I’m done working and getting cold, I imagine the radiating warmth of them from dozens of feet away.

The rain is slowing. Later, I go for a bike ride and pass an old woman tending her tomatoes, they’re planted in big, ugly, plastic tubs, but the plants themselves are beautiful, tall and newly lush from the rain, and the woman herself is beautiful, the way she’s bent to the plants, grey hair across her face, so focused on her task she doesn’t notice my passing, though I could almost reach to touch her. Maybe she’s hard of hearing. Maybe she doesn’t care.

The road tilts downward. My tires throw flecks of mud high into the air; it plasters my shins, paints a stripe up my back. It’s going to rain some more, I can tell. But maybe, if I pedal fast enough, I’ll beat it home.