It rained for three days in the middle of summer.
Not the sharp brief rain of storms, but the slow persistent rain of a season that has paused to reconsider itself — grey and warm and unbroken, the kind of rain that turns a household inward on itself. The garden became a different place: the sounds of it changed, the smell of it changed, the quality of looking out at it changed. The plum tree, fully leafed now and dense with its summer growth, held the rain in its branches and released it in slow drops that were heavier than rain itself.
I had always liked this kind of weather. There was something in the grey continuous quality of it that suited the part of my nature that had learned, over centuries, to be comfortable with interiority. Long grey days did not oppress me the way they oppressed people who needed the sun to organize their sense of forward movement. I had enough internal organization to remain oriented without external light.
