05/09/09 - Days ago the little boxes that display upcoming weather were uniform gray, filled with clouds shedding tears, offering high and pessimistic percentages of chance of rain.

Rain it has, in bookends, pouring at night and into the morning, but leaving good parts of the days sunny if not quite warm. Not quite Camelot days, but close enough.

The shad is coming into bloom, almost in protest, refusing to be cosseted any longer by the spring that cannot take hold. It was the faintest blush on the land as April ended, a reminder that nothing holds back the march of the seasons. These few days of intermittent sunshine have turned the pink buds to white blossoms. Lilacs, hardly showing life a week or two ago, are leafed out and ready to bloom with just a bit more warmth.

This is the time of year, this turn from April’s end, the night of the year on some calendars when the darkness is especially manifest and witches roam central Europe turning to the celebration of May, the Merry Month of May, usually brings magic. The grass is as green as it gets, as thick and lush, newly cut, velvet in the sun. It is warm and sunny in my mind, a time of new puppies and elegant egrets, of a world truly escaped the bonds of winter. This year it is a battle, the rain is pushed aside for a few sunny hours, the land begins to dry, then the sun lowers in the west and the fog simply appears, damp and cold, settling like a blanket of gloom.

The power has been going out lately, little blackouts that are not long lasting, and this time of year, haven’t the menace they do in winter. There is no fear of lines down, of prolonged outages, of no heat or lights in the cold dark. They surprise me, though, often I have no idea the electricity has failed until I notice blinking lights on some appliance.

The television clicked off, the lamp went out, but the moon, in a night before the rain began, shone in the window and I knit to the end of the row before putting the half finished hat down and going to look to the harbor.

The island is never completely dark, even when only emergency lights shine there are bright specks across the water. There is always, it seems, a car coming down High Street, its headlight white in the dark, surprisingly visible so far distant. That last night when the power went out I went upstairs and looked out. I’ve noticed before, there is a slight lag before the red lights on the top of the tower at the power company come on, seemingly preceded by a white flash.

Almost immediately, as I stood there wondering how long it would be, the sparse lights of a power outage were devoured by the returning flood of illumination. In winter, there is often a kicking in of the furnace when the electricity has been off any length of time, but it is May, cold, but May. I’d gone upstairs in the dark and turned nothing on; only when I noticed my neighbor’s outside light shining bright did I know this little event was already history. When I turned to go back downstairs the alarm clock was flashing annoyingly, a muted chant of “fix me, fix me.” I threw a corner of a sheet over it and went back to my knitting.

Tonight, I cannot see my neighbor’s; the harbor could be beyond the horizon. There is a faint light of a moon diffused by the fog that settled before sunset, the fields are dark, the sky slightly less dark, as though we are in a stage of creation, a step beyond the void. More than a step; it is still and quiet and close to the window I can hear the peepers’ chorus rising from the swamp.

The forecast calls for more rain.

“Grab the umbrellas … again,” the newscaster says. We have been experiencing umbrella rain, unusual here, rain that falls straight with no wind to turn it sideways or to flip the fragile skeleton of an umbrella. It is a nice change, going out in the dark, into a rain that does not hit the windows and I do not even hear inside, more than a drizzle, less than a downpour, deflected by a mere umbrella.

My cousin laughs that I am so enthralled by umbrellas, by the luxury of being able to use such a citified apparatus. I write that line for him.

There are summers when it does not rain, when the earth is parched and we speak of droughts all the while knowing a Block Island drought is more an inconvenience than a life threatening disaster. It is not the famine inducing horror we see on the news in other parts of the world, nor the fire driving force it has been in the western part of our nation. There are no reservoirs marked by years of lowering water levels, no fields stripped of topsoil by endless winds. Still, the land is glad when rain comes.

In April, and now May, when it is so wet and soggy, the earth seems to exhale when the rain ceases and rejoice when the sun comes out; it hums with happy music when a breeze lifts water into the warming air.

The vernal pond at the gate stays full. The mallards have a place to swim undisturbed, a little pondlet with plenty of vegetation but being ducks they decide to paddle about in the muddy puddle in the road. Ducks in a Puddle sounds like some short-order cook lingo — “give me two ducks in a puddle.”

A slight change in the words of the newscaster pushing the 11 o’clock news makes me flip over to a weather site. We are sitting in a sea of clear blue on the radar, with only a smudge of yellow rain around the edges. The regional picture is different; almost all of New York State, the eastern part of Pennsylvania and New Jersey north of Atlantic City are underwater.

It’s headed our way, the ducks will be happy.