Near the road's end

That glorious sound that has been missing for so long is back, the sound of thunder. Lightning snakes through the clouds and brightens the overcast sky in a searing flash. Cars swish by through the rain and torrents flood the sky and my ears. I've missed the rain and the sound of thunder. The blossoms on the tree next door are deep pink and stand out as though freshly painted, the backdrop of pale yellow-green leaves brighter and more real now that it's raining. Everything is darker, brighter, clearer with the rain and the air smells like spring. The sun gilded everything moments before but the massed clouds hold the world in a twilight grip, the day hanging between dawn and dusk like the world is holding its breath, eyes half closed, still, but not silent.

This explains my recent lethargy and heaviness, the sense of some impending something suddenly released like elastic pulled to its limits and let go. I feel energized as I always am during a storm with so much electricity and energy in the pounding rain that needles my flesh. I've missed this. I need this. And to think so many people fear this. I cannot imagine why, but probably can't imagine why someone would feel as if the bottom dropped out of the world when looking down from a height the way I do. Then again, they probably haven't fallen thirteen feet from the slender grasp of a rope swing in a tree to a debris-littered jungle floor with only an arm ripped open and a hairline fractured humerus and got up and walked away. I can.

I don't know if everything has its opposite or that there are subtler shadings to the universe where all possible choices and situations and states exist at the same time mirrored in the myriad differences of every person on this planet and every parallel world that moves in all directions from this point. There are degrees of fear and elation, degrees of everything, but we seldom see the pastel and nearly black and white shades because the vibrant primary colors, the brightest white and the deepest black command the attention.

I wished for this rain last night, seeing it in my mind, hearing it with my heart, feeling it with my soul and knowing it would come today and wash the world and wash away the heaviness in me as I tossed and turned in the suffocating warmth of my bed last night. I am separating from this home where I have found solace and imprisonment, happiness and discontent. I know it is time to move on. I have lived here longer than I've lived anywhere since I left home thirty-five years ago and I know my next home, a simple cottage at the edge of the alley, is temporary, too. There is another home waiting for me, a home where I can finally put down roots and let them thrust down into the hard packed skin of earth and drive through the soil like a Methuselah tree instead of the shallow-rooted pines so easily blown down in a violent, ripping wind. I have been transplanted too many times to count since I was born and have finally reached my natural home. There will be one other home, a quiet aerie higher in the mountains, a retreat, a place to re-energize my soul and my heart, to cleanse my mind of the sounds and lives that sometimes intrude and hem me in. At last, I am where I belong and I've had lots of experience letting go and moving on, being pushed or running from one temporary haven to another, but not for much longer. My road is narrowing and coming to an end, not a final end, merely a permanent home from where I can welcome travelers and direct them onward. My mother will be so proud. I'm almost an adult.

Like a long soaking rain, instead of the wind harried storm that blows in and moves on, my life has changed. I have changed. Both are needful and both welcome, but the change is as welcome as it is inevitable.