by Bethany Jarmul

“Mom, it’s blurry out there,” my four-year-old son says of the downpour—as if rain’s essential quality is not its wetness, not the way it soaks through my cotton hood and clean hair, not its ability to feed the pepper plants, to quench the thirst of the deer, to refill our 60% water bodies, not the way it overfills the stream and surrounds our neighbor’s SUV, floods their basement, carries off their trash cans while we watch from above like angels heaven never sent—but rather the way it obscures our ability to see across the valley or catch a glimpse of sky. When the rain stops, a clarity will come, an earthworm smell, a reminder of how my feet are growing up from the ground, even when my mind bumps the moon or my thoughts bounce off stars and boomerang with the asteroids. Somewhere in another galaxy, the answer I’ve been craving my entire life lives and breathes, but I can’t see its breath through the storm.

Image by Vlad Chețan via Pexels