Changed

Lee, the guy who delivered our morning paper for years, has retired. I always recognized the sound of his car tooling around the neighborhood, pulling into driveways and backing out, tires crunching on gravel, drawing nearer until he finally turned in a wide circle in front of our house and I would hear the paper smack against the asphalt (on, in rainy weather, against the base of the garage door where it would be protected by the eaves from the wet.) Then, I would hear the car moving away, continuing its accustomed route until the sound was swallowed by distance. This almost always took place between three and four o'clock in the morning.

The new guy must not be an early riser, or he runs the route differently, leaving our house until later. So far, he has never arrived before six in the morning. I can no longer go out and fetch the paper and look at the headlines before bedtime. I miss that. I am attached to routine, and dislike disruptions to it. I lose track of time without those little reminders to which I am accustomed. the hour between three and four is now too quiet.

This night it has not been utterly silent, though, as the gentle rain has been continuous for hours, and the trickling of the gutters and the downspout has provided a pleasant music. I think the cats are enjoying it, too. They sit like sphinxes, but with paws tucked in, alternately dozing and gazing at whatever it is that cats see, or imagine they see, that we never do. The sight of them, their enduring patience and calm, is quite relaxing. I find myself wondering what the rain sounds like to their sensitive ears. What to me seems like gentle Mozart might to them more closely approximate thunderous Beethoven. Still, they show no excitement. Perhaps they find subtleties beyond the range of my hearing, and what I imagine would be merely loud, they find intricate and filled with meaning. How fascinating it would be to know what they experience.

But what I will now experience, I hope, is sleep. Things to do this afternoon, rain or no.

Missing Link

I was going to add a link to my post this morning, and completely forgot. (I blame the rain and the cats for making me feel so relaxed.) Anyway, here it is now. It is a link to my very first Spam Subject Line Found Poem, posted in the spamdump comunity. It is (as the name indicates) assembled from a selection of subject lines of spams I've recently received, arranged into something that resembles verse, but isn't. I suppose it's sort of like William S. Burroughs' cut-and-reassemble works. I'm actually rather pleased with the way it turned out, and I'll probably do more of them when I get the time.

I woke up to see fog, and went out to find that it was filled with mist. Gradually, the drops of mist coalesced and became rain, and the fog slowly diminished, and now it has become an ordinary rainy day. But for a while, it was quite splendid to see a rainstorm from inside the cloud itself. I suppose that ducks and geese get to see that sort of thing all the time. Airplane pilots, too, perhaps. I hope they appreciate it.