Sometimes, on a morning in September, you spare a thought to wonder when the sun will come up – you know the light is getting later in the mornings, and coffee comes before the dawn.
And then a single raindrop hits the window – followed by another, and another… and then a million of their closest friends come crashing down around you. Your kitchen is transported, the smell of rain from an open window wafting in – damp and cool – the first cold front of autumn heralded by the roll of distant thunder.
You breathe it in. For water is life, but on a morning in September, when the summer still hangs on like a predator, the drops of rain that come with that first storm system herald death instead.
A welcome respite, though a brief one, that will bring another after it – you don’t know when, but you know it will follow. For though the heat returns in a day this time, next time it will be two days, maybe? And then the evenings will crisp and autumn will sweep across the prairie as gently as that first drop that hit the window, but as unrelenting as the millions that came after it.
