I didn’t know before I got here, how well the rain would suit me. It’s good for me. It was briefly warm and beautiful, and embarrassingly and stupidly, that seems to throw me off. It just kind of makes me feel guilty that I’m sanding off parts of my brain and making my eyes cross in front of this screen when I could be in the woods or by the sea. But the thing is…I can’t seem to find the time. I know this is my shortcoming. People with far bigger, far more important jobs than I have keep bees, they take up sourdough baking, find their way to the sea. I’m just a winemaker, for heaven’s sake. I know there must be time, but I think I forgot how to find it. The rain makes it feel ok be inside with this cup of tea, this record that sounds just like the rain, this screen and this long list of things to do. I got a bunch of starts in in the garden in one showy burst and then the rain returned so I could turn my back on them again and get some work done while they got themselves watered without me. Even though I know the time is racing past just as quickly, the rain makes it feel like someone pressed pause. When the sun is shining and everything bursts forth, I can feel myself start to panic a little. The visual cues that time is charging forward just make me feel more behind. Crazy, I know, but not crazier than some people are feeling.

KC moved here from the Veneto and if the sun doesn’t shine on her shoulders soon, we’re all going to hear about it. G ruined his only pair of shoes at the Pride Parade while the curls on the drag queens uncoiled and dripped down their sequined backs. Both of them salty. The pool’s cloudy, the firewood’s wet, the shops are out of vitamin D and the ground’s too soggy to mow. Everyone’s pacing the vinerows, covercrops up to the knees, hoping to find the little flower-cluster primordia have somehow found light and heat enough to burst forth into bloom, to pollinate themselves, to launch us finally towards What Comes Next, in a fleeting, drape of white lace. But all is still, today, indefinitely, green.

We know that when a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue but when a name for a color is indefinite, it is almost always green. Somehow, tonight, this makes sense. The color of life, the actual hue that makes our rocky planet a living world, is somewhere between the blue of water and the green of land. Tonight, in this dark house, in the blue light of my own letter still being written, I look down at the green bracelet on my wrist, read what’s written in little silver beads and remember — this too shall pass. Not just that the list will get shorter, or the letter will find its end; not only that I’ll get up from this table, that I’ll eventually find my way back to the sea. Not that the tomatoes will set fruit or, more meaningfully, the grapevines. Not simply that the nuisances are short-lived, but so too the joy. We have to sink in where we are.

Just as sure as the sun will be as far as it’s going to get, this year, from this now-dark house in exactly three hours, so the days will get shorter, and brighter. The ground will dry, and the pool will clear. Pollen will touch stigma, ovule will form seed and the berries will swell, darken, soften, and sweeten. We’ll make our way to the sea. But in the meantime, the drag queen is singing her heart out and the parade is passing us by. Let’s flip the record one more time and pour fresh water over the tea leaves. Let’s raise our voices and wave our flags. You don’t need a bracelet to know what we know; we just need to remember to feel it.

~Maggie