Connections Tempest Tossed

    Quiet rain, heavy rain, thunderstorms, we’ve had them all this week, and the forecast isn’t for sun until Saturday, if then.

    Many East Enders have been frustrated by this unrelenting downpour. Set back in the annual rush to finish outdoor jobs before Memorial Day, landscapers and those who work in construction have been particularly aggravated.

    But while the rain has been bad news for them — and certainly it was serious business elsewhere in the country — for me, I have to admit, it was a pleasure.    

    For one thing, any hint of pressure I might have felt about yard or garden evaporated. If we’d had sun, I would have had to do something about the tall grass growing around the house, and face all those empty pots awaiting flowers on the patio. Standing ankle-deep by a storm drain on North Main Street, as I loaded groceries from the I.G.A. into the trunk of my car, I didn’t even mind the water bubbling all around.

    You sometimes hear people say that rainy weather is good for sleeping. My husband is recuperating from surgery this month, and he was sitting up in bed the other day reading poetry by Julia de Burgos, a Puerto Rican writer whose work he had recently discovered. I was on the phone talking to a friend about it, and she said, “It’s perfect weather for poetry.”

    A fragment of a poem in a college compilation by a young woman I knew has never left me, although I’ve undoubtedly garbled it somewhat over the years:

    “Perhaps I flung too much away/ On mad forsythia in May/ Too soon, great greenness overrules.”

    My friends laughed at the poem at the time. College was in New Jersey, where forsythia is at its peak in April rather than May, just as it is here. Never mind, I liked the feeling the lines conveyed, as well as the rhyme.

    If any forsythia was still blooming this week, the rains did it in. The lilacs and yellow irises may have come back, as they do every year, but great greenness has overruled here, deepening on the ground and in the trees.