Twenty-five miles west of Tanglewood, savoring a concert of orchestral rain, fresh atonal water music, I can't see the conductor from where I sit, my person dry but sonically awash, steady pattering on the drive, trees instruments of shimmering glissandos, each of countless leaves numbering in lush symphonic undertaking, punctuated in my sensurround world, openings at four exposures, with wet whooshing solos from the east when a car hightails by.

Ah, that's it my darling, my attempt to be poetic at the moment, and I hereby abandon the effort, though wonder what E.D. if she were sitting in my very spot would make of such a rain. Her metaphors would be different, she was east of Lenox, Tanglewood hadn't been invented yet, did her house have gutters?, and certainly there were no rubber tires fluming water in an acutely melancholic way against black asphalt - not the cars, nor the petroleum-based tar...

Thinking of E.D. since I'm still immersed in the Sewall biography...

The rain has just now intensified, dramatic moment mid-symphony (I assume) - the work began with prefatory rolls of thunder against a dry but darkening sky...

Where are you, I wonder, somewhere by a vast cold gray sea?

I looked up the town where you live, I didn't realize it was right on the water, it's a wonder I hadn't looked it up before, I had assumed you were near Megalopolis center, but no - quite in the exurbs, at water's edge - the geography, from maps, looks lovely, there's a wine bar, and racquet club, and yacht club - beautiful, by the bay like that...

Darling, downstairs on the stove of Gull Cottage kitchen sits a fragrant pot of Indian-spiced chicken, seasoned with spices that you yourself, dear Captain, absconded with from exotic oriental shores (duty free, in an era before Customs) in your blood & swashing all over the water world. And because I reside on terra firma (sorta) I happily dream up recipes to incorporate your exotic powders - cinnamon, cumin, cardamom - along with herbaceous ones I keep fresh in drinking glasses - cilantro, parsley - and gratings of fresh ginger of uncertain provenance from the supermarket...

Oh darling, timeless concert from the skies continues here, erupting, when the rain trails off & lulls, with sudden birdsong, like applause a trifle too soon (rude mirroring in a way of the conductor's ever-anticipatory gesture a beat ahead - I never did understand how conductors could perform that mental feat, as they're awash in the music around them) when it's thought that the composition is over...

the rain has stopped - birds are busily, volubly chattering -
the critics

wait - there's an encore

here she comes again
xoxo darling

P.S. Wish so much I could include a link to the ravishing Willie Nile song, Her Love Falls Like Rain, I simply can't find a video of it. But oh - sweetheart - such are my sentiments, rain pounding now against my windowpane -