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Seven short pieces about weather. They don’t change and they don’t ask anything.

A rain gauge on a porch rail doesn’t do anything. It sits through a long dry stretch and through the storm that finally breaks it, filling only when there’s something to fill it with, empty the rest of the time. No one checks it every hour. Weeks can pass. Then someone walks by after rain and there it is, holding exactly what fell — no more, no less, no opinion about any of it.

Fog can sit on a valley for days, thick enough to swallow the tree line, and no one down in it can say when it will lift. It does not announce itself leaving. One morning the ridge is just there again, sharp at the edges, as if it had never gone anywhere. The valley remembers only the not-seeing, not the leaving.

Night does not fall on some houses and spare others. It comes down the same over the whole block, at the same hour, indifferent to what’s happening behind any particular window. Inside one house someone sleeps without waking. Inside another someone counts the hours by the sound of a passing car. The dark covers both, and asks neither what kept them up.

A road holds the shape of every truck that has ever leaned on it, and still gets driven every day like it owes nothing. Rain fills the low spots. Frost heaves the edges. None of it is repaired before morning, and morning uses the road anyway.

A front can move a hundred miles in a day, dragging rain and low pressure behind it like something it can’t put down. Then it moves on, the way fronts do, taking the rain to whatever is next in its path. The land it crossed goes on holding the water it left, long after the front itself is somewhere else entirely.

A field cut in September looks finished by December: stubble flattened by frost, ground the color of nothing. Underneath, roots hold on, undisturbed, doing slow work that has no season of its own. Nothing about the surface admits this. A field in winter keeps every root it started with.

Lightning walks a far ridgeline, too far for the sound to arrive as anything but a delayed mutter. The valley floor stays dry. Clouds drag their rain across a range the road does not climb. From here the storm is a shape on the horizon, and the ground underfoot is only the ground.

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If this, then that

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Something to put on

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