The Wind has Returned.

You may have been here last week, rifling the wind chimes, disturbing the sleepy quiet of branches as they open to the Spring Equinox that showed up recently. It may be that this morning I’m simply more open than usual to the wind, the rain, and the racket they bring into the quiet life I lead. But, now that winter has slipped into the past and the future is underway in this new vehicle, which seems so ready each year to welcome new beginnings, I want to be ready to answer the call.

Early dawn has moved on and a light rain, which the wind must have been bringing in its wake, has arrived to embody feelings promised in the clamor of chimes and the stirring of branches. The sound of rain falling on the drum skin of our sunroom roof infiltrates my senses.

The tree branches on the other side of the arroyo behind our house, now defined in the dim morning light, are reflected in the sliding glass doors, which used to mark the outside of our brick home, but now provide entrance from the living room into the sunroom where I spend my mornings reading, answering a few e-mail–and sometimes—writing something which I hope can become a blog post for the week.

But I’m straying from the impulse that started my appreciation of the sound of rain on the roof above my head. I was remembering times in years gone by, when rain was more frequent than it is in Albuquerque. I was remembering the summer of 1965 which I spent in Happy Valley Labrador–a time when I was licking my (self-inflicted) wounds from the recent loss of a college romance–and remembering how when the wind-driven rain was beating against the window pane of my rented room, I would sometimes put on a raincoat, don a hat, and set forth into the rain-swept streets of the neighborhood.

Perhaps because I grew up in Montreal, this morning’s rain casts me back to earlier times in my life. In the desert city of Albuquerque, wind that seems to promise rain frequently doesn’t follow through; so when it does I can’t help remembering.

In Happy Valley, Labrador, the rain made a traveler out of me: a pacing back and forth in a space touched by loss and uncertainty about what would come next. But even then, rain brought a sense of comfort: as the sky lowered and touched the earth, as water and air intermingled and enveloped me like a blanket.

Today, as I sit on the sun room couch, with my blue cast slightly elevated on a pillow–the day not calling out to me yet–I feel the pleasure of uncommitted time and space drawing my mind out into the neighborhood in which I now live.

This morning these memories also feel like the gentle rain brought in by the wind; they lack the sharp edges of the incessant thinking which opens the door for worry and expectation to step in. The rain has nowhere it needs to be, nothing to do, and who am I to decline this invitation from the present moment to linger just a while longer?