A stealth rain . . . lying in bed I thought I heard a bird outside rattling the bushes as they do some mornings, but after listening for a minute I decided it must be raining, and it was. A very gentle rain, collecting on the roof and dripping off, more like a trickle. This went on for a bit and over the next few minutes it began to rain a bit harder, now you could tell it was raining, but still hardly wet the porch, but the end of the driveway, out from under the trees has a few puddles. Reminded me of the quote from Shakespeare about mercy "The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath." So we got a gentle mercy of rain this morning and our place was grateful.
The pictures from one of the cameras downtown show big black clouds building up and gray streaking the early morning, though here there is more blue showing, there are enough white clouds and haze to make the yard mostly shady with occasional stripes of sunlight. The cat is making his careful way across the yard, shaking his feet off at nearly every step. He does not like to get his feet wet, but seems this morning finding out what is going on over here is worth the trouble. He has been cruising the margin of the cane for a few minutes now. I don't see anything in there, but perhaps I am not looking with the eyes of a cat. The rain was just enough to make everything quiet, no cicadas this morning and only a little bird song. and no lawnmowers . . . yet.
In the night, for several nights now, maybe a week, a frog has sung its song outside the study window, for hours, from exactly the same place each night. I have not seen it, but feel intimately acquainted with it, lying in the dark hearing its small croaking tune rise into the night, barely pausing for breath, reeling out on and on, making darkness its stage, and the night its audience. This morning its gone, sleeping in the heat of the day, even the rain not enticing it to sing again. In going through poems this morning, I though a poem about frogs and love could start the day, as the frog's song has started each night lately.
Green Frog at Roadstead, Wisconsin
It is the way of a pleasant path
To walk through white birch, fir,
And spruce on a limestone trail
Through the quiet, complacent time
Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps
And you jump after him, laughing,
Hopping, frog and woman, to show
The stationary world its flat ways.
Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly
To your green eyes and they leap
At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World
With you and try the leaping ways
Of the heart that we do not fail to find
The sunlit air full of leaping chances.
James Schevill
I am fairly sure our frog is black, and so tiny you could not imagine it would have such a large continuous voice if you saw it. When I go outside in the early afternoon, sometimes the little black frogs look like crickets in the grass until you realize they leap like frogs, with such perfect abandon that they come down again flat on their bellies, splat, not at all like the lightly leaping of an insect. You have to admire them, their strong legs propelling them in a leap that ends in falling so flat, yet they keep going.
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