The very first sound of the rain came as a faint popping on the kitchen window, rolled out as it was to hasten Spring’s coolness into the stuffy trailer…warmed inside as it was from heater and hard drive and concentration’s frenzy. With the striking on the pane of the slanted drops I turned away from searching the microcosm of mental mastery to reopening myself to the macroworld’s delight…

            Streaming now down the glass onto my shoe, left too close to the window, the opening a little wide for the wind and spraying a bit inside…just to remind me how close I am to peril just beyond the stoop.

            The hawk doesn’t care a bit about a little sprinkle in the chill of the afternoon, spinning slow spirals above the ridge, scanning his resolute gaze for the field mouse hiding ‘neath the lemon tree across the way. Soon the great white owl will noiselessly appear at the crown of the olive near where the old house had been, there watching me as I watch him and as we watch each other…late into the night through the steam from the bath…

            I couldn’t recall really when my thoughts turned to you. Maybe it was when the jade glistened wet in the late afternoon sunlight, or the lime juice tucked in the corner by the coffee winked anciently at me to say, “remember?” Or, as the stillness of the quiet after the sprinkle softly stroked my sentiment to say, “remember?” It was then, or, maybe…then…

            But it was all about the bougainvillea’s purple blossoms twisted about the olive tree (it’s constant companion and competitor for solar nurture…one month one is the taller, the next the other)…that viney burst of gay color that cheers without speaking and smiles without lips…whose fragrance drifts for yards along the breezes sneaking up the canyon and touches me and swings my mood before I realize…yes, those deep colors bring me back to you, when you braided them through your hair…when I stroked your breast with purple petals’ passionate play…ah, the tree brings me back…

            The late gray day is darkening in the way that only California’s time flows…minutes passing like hours, and hours like days…timeless turning of Earth borders, but where no borders exist. Away in the harbor, near black weather lurks, its lusty smoke belying the weather within. The sashes trimmed, the door twisted shut…windows cracked low before the gusts now skimming the edge of the gorge…I brace for the storm…to blow and wash and clean my melancholy away, and restore a courage sapped by past gales…and dream of past lives…when the bougainvillea crested your face…and made me smile.