Gratitude

By Susan Tweit

It rained the other night, wetting the Adirondack chair I had perched on the two flagstones that make up the patio Richard and I have started to lay, stone by stone, in the courtyard just off our bedroom.

Fat drops plopped on the red sandstone flags, kicking up puffs of fragrant dust until the steady patter darkened the surface of the stone, until the stone glimmered with water and the air smelled wet and alive.

It rained until the trellis around the kitchen garden was hung with diamond drops of water, until the tires of passing cars splashed in the sheet-flow on the streets, until the rush and gurgle of rain had the gutters singing again.

The next morning, our rain gauge registered about three-tenths of an inch of water. Not much, but enough to briefly revive this high-desert valley, where life survives remarkably well on very little water.

(Our average annual precipitation – rain and snowmelt combined – is just ten inches. We haven’t reached that average in several years; we’ve been getting more like six or eight inches.)

Perhaps you live where rain is a regular visitor, and you can’t imagine the gratitude we feel for its occasional wetting. To go for weeks or months without life-giving water falling from the sky is to shrivel inside, weary of cloudless day after cloudless day, the ground dusty, the plants brittle, our spirits cranky and out-of-sorts, and the landscape around us silenced as life is silenced.

We wait for rain, for hope, for life’s return.

And when it comes, we are grateful, our faith in life – the capital L stuff, the whole grand cycle of birth and death and dissolution of molecules into atoms that agglomerate eventually into the building blocks of new life – is itself renewed.

For a week after that rain, our wildflower-filled “unlawn” was greener, the scarlet splashes of indian paintbrush and gilia brighter; the blanketflower, Mexican hat and evening-primrose began to bloom again, and the hummingbirds zipped around energetically, their nectar-field revived.

But no more rain fell, and the brown tinge crept back, the bunch-grasses crisping underfoot, the wildflowers producing fewer and fewer blooms, the soil turning dusty again.

Even still, on cool mornings before dawn, I can smell that rain in the moisture of the night air, hear in memory the music of the plopping drops and the gurgling gutters, and feel its promise of abundance in my bones. And I am filled with gratitude.

For rain. For life. For the kindness and love from friends, family and community that helps buoy Richard and I on this journey with his brain cancer.

As we prepare to drive over the mountains yet again for his next infusion of Avastin, the chemotherapy drug that may be slowing the glioblastoma in his right brain, making space for gradual healing, my well of hope and faith is filled again.

I bow to this drought-stricken Earth, to the process of Life itself, to all of you. Just to be on this journey, no matter how difficult, is a gift. My deep gratitude.