We'll Drop Hand in Hand

Ode to all of the sounds that our water makes, though I cannot help that I feel alone. But is a drop ever alone? It might seem like a million years of confinement, but falling from the sky might be the best thing that ever happened to me. When water is dropping from the sky, it sings a mute song. The pedestrian walking home on the Creeper Trail with a skip in her stride sees the rain coming, the layered sheets that always seem to come in her way. The woman, walking in Washington County Virginia knows the rain is coming with all her senses. The woman, whose name happens to be Betty, smells the rich smell that rises from the horse pastures. Wet hitting hard dry earth. Water splattering against humus and pies of equine compost. As the earth grows mushy, as the roots reach their tender appendages wanting dampness, I am plunging downwards, feeling like pumpkin dropped mistakenly from a produce truck. I cannot see that I am part of something larger than myself. I take this on faith. This is the lowdown on raindrops. We live a full life, collecting ideologies in our crystal identities, but only to evaporate in our solitude. The ride up to heaven wipes our memory bank plum dry. We know so little in the clouds but feel so buoyant in our childhood that we float on air. Some of us who cluster over arid zones long enough to learn the alphabet, to introduce ourselves to our friends and companions. But when lightening strikes and thunder rolls, Wind drops us loose to fall like spiders being kicked out of their web. Wind is with us, but we do not know what that means entirely. We are bright, whispers of hope in a world that could use rain, but we do not know our potential. Like a poet who does not know it, we are the single most integral requirement for Life. We were born with toxins in our metaphoric lungs and lead in our figurative brains. I try to keep my mind healthy, not awakened to the idea that I might live in the company of others. On the Creeper Trail, Betty the librarian has given up on her umbrella. The sun of the day peeps a ray through me and I see in my home grown mirror, a tear of gratitude in a woman's eye. Remain hopeful whispers a voice. Wind perhaps? Studs Turkel? Some part of my inner island I did not know I had? Remain hopeful. We are all wandering seekers: Betty the librarian, Studs, etc. A drop is to drop, I realize in a watershed moment. Hope says that all of we droplets are in the same pitcher. We are as different as snowflakes, and our conscience in collective has seen a glimmer. We are out of control, exposed to the bipolar moral energy of the land. The world is unknown. But the ray of sunshine has worked us into a collective rain sheet, that like a hundred monkeys washing sweet potatoes, the critical point is reached in elements that are right, and we now risk enough face to imagine that there are drops like us elsewhere. We are not alone! We are in the company of others! We are we! We yodel into the wind. Collectively, we all seem land on Betty the librarian at the same time. I land on a finger of her left hand, immediately pooling together in a friendly group of hopefully rejoicing water, soaking up the positive influence of Betty. As the librarian flings her good sturdy shelving arm, we fly off the joyful, bookish woman never looking up or back, gliding through the air in a clump, passing through a board of the bridge, and into the creek below. Constantly changing, collecting ourselves along the way, we follow the watershed down stream to the Clinch River, under bridges and over minnows and fresh water snails, to the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. Some of us evaporate along the way. We lie back and watch them go, letting go our love for them and growing our love for them simultaneously. We all will evaporate someday into a time and place unknown, our memories sucked dry again. Time is relative. I have traveled up rivers that flow up, down rivers that gurgle down. I have fallen so many times, always delicately dropping between the realms of hope and wonder. It is fine to wonder, to fear, to feel we are islands, to trap ourselves under dense debris in secret desire to prolong our time in the ocean. I never will see Betty again as she was, her eye so light in belief while wise in knowledge, looking at the rainbow in my mirror face, as if Wind had told her for the first time that things will be alright if we do our share and keep trying. But I will see her molecules in new places, and I can listen to Wind and the advice he must have given her.