Early, when angels and demons duel over their charges, I woke, my legs singing with electricity. Blondie’s song, “Call me, call me any day or night. Cover me with kisses, roll me in designer sheets” crawled like an ear worm. But it wasn’t just her voice in those words.
I walked outside and looked toward humps of trees, reminding me of islands off the coast of Maine. We’d found safe harbor at our second parents’ home on a cove protected from the wild Atlantic. Orion was cocking his leg toward the western horizon. All day the fields had roared with dust. Corn stalks flew into the air, smeared the roadsides, as the big machines chiseled their fields.
Call me.
And so I called. Clouds, wetter than the dry air, come. Let there be bold lightning strokes and thunder like tympani way high. Let us smell glorious petrichor, rising as soil and moisture meet. Let us hear the drops nickering against the windows, trotting along the driveway and into the fields, gray horses.
Roll me in designer sheets, glorious gray sheets of rain. Let me lift my face to kisses falling from a couple thousand feet.
But I could feel the earth tilt. I could feel the weight of sunrise, the weight of another sun-washed day, with no rain, and dust billowing around the men working their fields. Gravel pinched my feet.
Call me.
But I’ve said enough. Enough I said. Bring a front. Bring wet Gulf air. Bring the rain.
