Sitting

I spent a while this afternoon sitting. Law practice is one of those jobs that can easily take over the mind, and one can spend even one's scant "free time" designing part of a contract, composing and rehearsing arguments, mentally cataloging information gathered or needed for some purpose, and amending or reshuffling multifarious checklists. Some people can thrive on just that. I can't, and fairly often I like to spend a bit of time focusing on nothing other than my immediate surroundings, giving no mental energy or room to the question what happens next, and setting aside for a while all those mental checklists. I try to do this most days on the bus ride home, and sometimes that's not quite enough.

Today's weather might have been just about perfect for late spring. Mostly sunny, with broken high and mid-level clouds and cumulus a few thousand feet up (not so perfect, then, if you like to fly light aircraft). Eighty degrees. The trees are in full leaf now, and the leaves of the thirty-five-foot (give or take) cottonwood in our backyard twisted gently in the slow breeze. Sweet smells floated to the window of this upstairs bedroom-turned-office from our flowering shrubs, some relative of honeysuckle I've yet to identify. Kids biked up and down the side street and around the cul-de-sac at the end.

I spent a few minutes watching the leaves of the cottonwood and didn't see the darker clouds approaching from the west. The temperature dropped a few degrees, the wind kicked up suddenly, and soon I had to shut the window to keep the raindrops out. I kept watching the leaves, which at first shook and shuddered under the early raindrops and wind, then bent over to drain off the steady rain.

Steady, but brief. The breezes relaxed after just a few minutes, a single, distant, elongated rumble of thunder signalled the end of the rain, and the sun almost immediately returned. I opened the window. The leaves of the cottonwood shook off the rainwater in fat drops. Only about ten minutes had passed.

A little while later, I heard the sounds of a sporting event -- soccer, perhaps, or maybe baseball -- echoing from the park nearby. From time to time I heard cheers accompanied by the muffled, muddy harshness of a voice on a loudspeaker. By that time I was no longer sitting and had turned once more toward work, but I still took comfort in the refreshing sounds, smells and warmth of a spring weekend afternoon.

(Photo July, 2005.)