My Favorite Creekbeds

 Woke up in the darknesss last night as I regained consciousness I noticed that a rainstorm had started. A more beats of consciousness brought to me the awareness that it was a ferocious storm of heavy hand and strong winds, the kind found at the front of the storm as it comes in. My instinctual reaction to panic slightly that something might be getting rained on, that I would prefer not to get rained on, kicked in, and it was confirmed in my conscious mind by the remembrance that I had used the rice-paper folding screen on the porch the previous day but had not put it away the night before, but left it out by the edge of the patio. Even in mild winds it is prone to tipping over, and then of impaling itself (yet again) on the posts of the bamboo folding fence, which is sturdy in all winds, but not high enough to provide the necessary shade for the sun in the morning hours. The rice paper folding screen is higher, and serves that purpose well in the morning despite multiple punctures from my negligence.

The rain was hard and I sat outside savoring it in the pitch darkness, on the rustic rocking chair that belongs technically to her mother, as it sat on their porch in their log cabin in Ohio before they moved to Arizona.

The peak of the ferociousness of the wind passed and gave way to mild gusts amidst a heavy steady downpour, which splashed onto the tilied roofs of the building and the asphalt and concrete below. Such a rain here is rare. "A monsoon rain at last," I said. We had gonie long into the summer without one, even as storms hit other parts of the Valley. We had seen dense dark clouds over the mountains, and rain had come to the far side but not to us. Finally we got some relief. 

I imagined out in the darkness the stream beds gathering up into a laminar sheets of water in the depressions, and then elongated into longer sheets until they connect and like a train, begin rolling downhills on the soaked ground, held above by the surface tension of the water. My favorite creek beds would begin flowing, even they have been re-engineered by the landscaping needs of development.