It's Still Raining

and I don't know if it is the rain, or the wild wind which forces the rain sideways, or maybe there is actually, secretly, a full moon which has sped my brain up and filled it with foolish notions, but full up it is - and just in time for bedtime.

it is the last day of winter, apparently. the blossoms have mostly been blown off their perches and the leaves have grown in their place - with incredible speed. my broad beans are about 3 inches high - slowly but surely they rise up. the possums don't seem to want to eat them (my friend says that's cause broad beans are disgusting) but they have munched the lettuce and the peas as soon as they were able. 

this full brain and distracting rain - falling in huge, noisy sheets on our roof -has got me thinking. about family mostly, about how far away they are. and how i really and truly am on an island. how, if everything changed, the end of the world and all that, i might be stuck here, an ocean dividing me and my mum, me and my dad, me and my brothers. the end of the world pops up in my head far too often. 

the possum is up and about. it's foot falls on the ceiling above sound disconcertingly human. plod, plod - like two human feet pacing above. how can a four pawed marsupial make such foreboding sounds? the screeching is worse. someone told sam that they try and piss on you, so whenever we go outside in the dark now we are thinking of this. another friend said it might just happen accidently as they try to escape up a tree - this sounds more reasonable but doesn't fit with my image of this brooding, antisocial possum whose urine stains the ceiling and whose frantic nest-making wakes us at 3am.

the weather in hobart is magnificent. sure it feels like it has rained for a million days, and it's cold and my breath turns into white clouds inside my house. 

but it is magnificent. 

a wild night offers up an impressive snow fall in the morning - a white capped mountain that glows fluro pink in the dawn. days of rain that dash any hope of clean, well, dry clothes turns the rivulet into a huge and urgent river pouring through and then dissapearing underneath the city. me and my friend play pooh sticks - racing twigs on the water - only to have our vessels disappear beneath the torrents. you can hear it roaring below when you walk over a sewer grate.

maybe it's the weather, maybe it's the inactivity of the day, maybe it's a song busting to get out.....either way, my head is full up with colour and questions and melody and apocolyptic worries...i don't think i'll sleep until my love returns home, a real someone who can ground these lofty imaginings and warm up this last day of winter.