corrugated tin clouds, or a perfect day

High a.m. clouds like corrugated tin precede rain. Rain comes, goes, and with it the clouds and with it the heat. Perfect powder sky running above me into the west as I run east, home.

She Likes Rainy Days the Best

Sometimes I know a story is right when the whole world seems to spin it into my lap. Today, I got one of those stories. It started as a journal entry a few days ago, just after a heavy rain. I wrote about the glow of freshly washed leaves, the darkness of the tree trunks, the lambent light in the air. Yesterday I decided to turn it into a story somehow. Over night the rains came. Gentle thunderstorms early in the morning, then off and on showers all day long. The world was telling me to write. Slowly, as I reworked my journal entry, a character emerged. A woman whose desire to be reborn is mirrored in the nascent quality of the world after a rain. The journal entry transformed into a plot, as the steady beat of raindrops on my window set the pace. How perfect that a story inspired by a rainy day got to be finished on a rainy day. The first line of the story is true for me, too: "She likes rainy days the best."