The camera can not capture what I see.
Pouring rain outside, slow and steady and constant. Leaves surfing the light breeze. The slower drip of water from the branches. A beautiful wet day, its damp chill asking for a fire. I took some pictures, but a still image doesn’t see the rain. It only exists as motion.
Perhaps this is a lack of skill on my part, less a failing of the camera than an inability to express the experience in this medium. But there is art that conveys the sense of a rainy Fall day: a more accurate, as it were, representation, a prompt for the imagination.
I’ve taken my glasses off so I can write. The visible world shrinks to my hands and pen and page; the frames lying idly by. The red of the barn and sumac define their shapes against Andrew Wyeth’s grey sky.
The gas rushes to heat water for my tea. Rain bounces on the leaves. Overhead, a plane interrupts. Even the loud noises of the world are quiet and still.
The tea is ready.