Two weeks ago, we walked along the banks and commented on how low the river was. A warm afternoon for lunch in the garden, and then walking in shorts and sandals. Late summer, but summer still, insects in the air, warm scent of mown grass sleeping into hay. And the waters low, the stone bed shining where the sun pierced the surface, fish huddling in the few shaded depths.
Then the rains came.
I remember Mrs Lingwood and the classroom with the sandpit and the beginning of learning that not all plurals simply add an ‘s’. The plural of sheep is sheep. Not sheeps. The plural of fish is fish. Fishes is a verb not a plural noun. I’m sure no-one actually said that. We also learned that some things don’t have a plural at all. Mrs Lingwood would not have used words like abstract noun.
That would have been Miss Lodge, who sent us to watch the tennis on the big black and white TV set in the dining hall and report back at intervals as to how Arthur Ashe was doing. There was no sandpit in her classroom. There was an A4 laminated chart of random words that came out at report time. It was supposed to determine your reading age. The last word on the chart was idiosyncrasy. I wasn’t the only person in the class to be able to read that far, but apparently I was the only one who then said: what’s that mean? Being able to sound a word out loud is such a long way from being able to read it.
Why does thinking about rain always make me think about my junior school? I have many other sodden memories, but school ones always swim to the surface first. Dad used to say that we remember the old days best because we’ve been practicing them for longest. If it’s true that we recreate a memory every time we pull it out of the drawer, maybe he wasn’t so wrong.
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Rains. Plural. Of course rain isn’t an abstract noun. There is nothing abstract about the drizzle that doesn’t feel like real rain until you’re soaked to the skin. There is nothing abstract about the downpour that mocks your hi-tech gear. Nothing abstract about floods.
Even so, I am not sure when “rain” becomes “the rains”. I suspect it’s towards the end of a week when it didn’t rain consistently or continuously but it rained more often than it didn’t. A week when it was temper-tantrum hoi’ing it down, and then calm and gently drifting, abating enough for the clouds to break, maybe even enough for there to be enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s trousers, but not for long, before it spitty-spotted, stopped, regathered, reupholstered the sky in gunmetal grey and settled in for the day of steady, not heavy, simple sustained persistent precipitation.
Rain. And more rain. A break. More rain. Different rain. Moods. Personalities. A family of weather (weathers?) that you’re always delighted to see arrive, but soon grow tired of: “the Rains”.
Between that picnic and today, the rains have been at play.
The river is high, not bank-breakingly so, but the fish have many more shadowed depths to slink into. Beaches have disappeared back into the stream. I walked the path, slipping and squilitching, sinking, sliding. I’ve barely got back into socks and trainers and we’re into boot season already.
The dark hollows in The Heronry are filling with water, leaves and twigs floating, iris blades bending their last, a tangle of alder and willow, a deep luscious mess of mystery beginning over. We think of Spring as the season of rebirth but for some of these places it comes with the autumnal wet.
Stepping over roots and mossed logs of other years, towards the temptation of the edge, feeling the land yield beneath me, not sucking me under, but not promising to hold me firm either. A slow warning ooze…and the drips from the trees, and uprooted trunks sinking branches into the ground beneath to maybe try again.
Startled by a shout. A dog being called to heel.
The path along the cow field is already ankle deep, new ways are being made, tramplings through the end-of-summer-die-back, breaking brash and nettle and grass and reed and balsam, a footpath high along the berm of the riverbank, left wild unto itself through the exuberance of the warm sun-and-insect days, reclaimed now, to save our shoes. And where the cattle lay seeking shade and cool, the greening gate stands high above a muddy pool.
I remember asking for the rain and I’m glad to see the landscape transforming into its winter self. Reluctant as any to let go of the long hours of daylight and the warmth of the sun, I start to relish the squelch, and the fungi-rings that greet my return that I swear were not there when I set out, and the preparations for the pageant of the trees, leaves drying even in the wet.
