The rain here hasn't ceased. The commuters have gone home for the weekend, and their umbrellas drowned, cast off at the entrances to subway stations, buildings scraping the sky open, and corporate coffee shops.
Worthless rain is what my lover calls this. It's come too fast, too hard for the earth to absorb it all.
But the watershed, I say.
Yes, the watershed, she says.
We're smoking cloves on the back porch in a prematurely cloaked evening. I look out at the leaves, drowning in rapids rushing for the curb; at the woman fighting wind under her umbrella, carrying groceries down Dunster; at the intense green against the jungle wetness.
If it were a warm rain, I'd go get soaked, I say.
She says something off the topic of rain, and we both move towards the door, together.
It's the middle of May, and our flesh shrinks from the humidity, chilled.
Inside, dinner's in the oven. A pot roast, the kind my mother used to make when my mother cooked: beef, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions.
My lover hates the texture of onions, the work it takes to chew their thin, silky leaves into mush, into something to swallow, to digest. When I serve the dish, I will be careful to spoon around the onions and give her extra carrots.
I'm thinking, as the smell of home permeates the apartment, that I don't think this rain is worthless, that I'm saddened by the soil we've paved over, built on top of, leveled away for our civilization to grow large.
I bring my lover closer to me on the sofa, as we watch the news, and I know that the flowered fruit trees in the Arboretum will be de-crowned by now from the force of this rain.
I worry about bridges, roads, basements, and families. I worry that we've taken too much from the rain.