Last night the rain spoke to me slowly, saying, what joy to come falling out of the brisk cloud, to be happy again in a new way on the earth! ~Mary Oliver~”Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me”
How I have decried the rain, spoiling as it did whatever plans I happened to have made, bemoaned the long gray spring days whose ultimate aim is to freshen the earth, bring it fully round from its winter doldrums. Nothing left to do but to stare out at it, listen to its insistent incessant pattering on eaves and windowsills as it depletes the clouds that have hung low these few days. It is only at night, another day done, that I emerge from my own cloud and realize that, apart from all else, the rain will find a way to ingratiate itself by lulling me to sleep with its sweet tappings.
The importance of rain to our very existence is hardly news. Without water, nothing on the planet would survive, and nature has developed a very efficient system for making sure that all life forms get enough of it. Simply put, rainwater is nothing more than a replication of itself as it moves constantly through a series of conduits that are not visible to us. What we do actually see as rain (or snow, sleet or any other form it takes in the winter) is moisture that condenses in the form the clouds above us. Once those clouds become too dense with moisture, it falls to the earth where it lands in already existing bodies of water or is absorbed by the soil. The plants then pull it up through their roots and then breathe it back out into the atmosphere in a process called transpiration, part of the endless cycle that keeps us all alive.
During a recent period of heavy rain, I took my usual look out from my living room windows and saw a white substance dripping down at the base of a pine tree. My vision not being what it used to be, I took another closer look through my field glasses and saw that the “white stuff” was a sort of foam that had formed on the tree’s lower bark. So off to my computer I went to find out what I was looking at, once again learning something new in the process.
The longer it rains, the more time the rainwater has to seep into a tree’s bark, reacting with substances and producing a white foam. The interactions between the chemicals in the tree’s sap and the minerals in the rain produce a kind of soap produced entirely by natural processes. On a pine tree, the “soap” appears because certain substances found in the sap are actually close in composition to soap. On other tree species, dust and organic materials combine during a rainy period to produce the white foam. If rain is involved, this usually does not indicate illness in the tree but simply nature doing its thing.
It is raining again today as I write, and I have the time to ponder this wonderful event. Like so much else in nature, it has much to say, and I will listen to whatever message is conveyed to me through the sounds of it splashing onto my watering can and windowsills. And then when it ends, a “spring cleaning” of sorts, the very air will smell new and fresh, heavy with promise of another glorious season of growth and resurgence, and none of it possible without rain, nature’s elixir.
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