Talking to the Rainmakers

My father called them "soft afternoons," a fairly common expression in his native country. I call them "English days." The precipitation is just too heavy to be mist but couldn't be called rain. The chill goes deeper than simply temperature and the lightest of breeze is mistaken for a biting wind.

I love these days.

These are the days when I most like to go walking. The sidewalks, slick and dark, are empty of the people who fear to venture out in such weather and the ring of radials on pavement can be heard from twice the normal distance. The cold and the damp bother me not at all. I quite like them, in fact, reminders of the visceral and the tactile that others would chagrin for casually wasted comforts. The city becomes contemplative and I become likewise, strolling at great length through drizzle and gray, my travel and my cognition both wandering as they please, taking some small bit of the rainy world with them.

It's been dry in Atlanta of late and I haven't had enough of these silent and solitary days. They hadn't been missed until this week. Though, I suppose it would be hubris to count my meditation as another casualty of the water crisis.

I think I'll go walking for a bit.