We'd grown accustomed to the rain. The incessant rain.
The waterlogged ground, the standing water all around.
Long weary months, no sight of sun, underfoot the soil is mud.
The seasons change from Winter into Spring; But still the rain,
still the lashing days, the night's when lulled to sleep by natures tattoo upon the roof.
Birds, rain soaked, dishevelled, find little shelter amidst the rain soaked leafless trees.
The industrious ducks, madly dibbling, turn the soaking ground to pools, their ever probing beaks sifting mud.
The despair of weather's dreary cycle, month after month. And then, the sun!  at last the sun!
How we rejoice; the rain has ceased at last.
Now the sun is here to warm the earth,
Trees and grass grow green again, embracing the warm, life giving rays. The countryside is growing beautiful again.
Now the lakeside is thronged with downy ducklings, brown and yellow ***** of energy, darting at the rising Mayflies.
The Geese also have their young and parade in line astern, a guardian in front and one behind.
The lonely Swan has made friends with a white Duck, and the Carp, great and small, are basking at the surface, warming their backs in the welcome rays. The soggy earth is turning hard, and new cracks appear daily.
No rain now, only the blazing Sun.
People lately clad in raincoats and boots, now roam about in lighter garb, bare backed, bare legged, turning redder  with each day.
The lonely country walks are now awash with sturdy hikers and the parks are thronged with Sun worshipers, stretched out to brown, like drying fish.
By the Hall, the lake shimmers like a mirror, and from my window I see the Swallows swooping low, dipping their beaks to the water for sedges and  and mayflies. The first Bats, from the culvert spread their wings and join the evening Swallows in their search for food.
Sun wind and water are in harmony.
How glorious the Earth with teeming life! How wonderful her colours and her creatures; I cannot truly comprehend so great a beauty.
All life is miraculous! the elements surely blessed.

Have you ever been so ******* scared, you’ve ****** yourself on the spot?
Or not, or when you were a child, when the fire alarm used to make dads head go wild… pulling and yanking on the wires of desperation, not being able to see the positive relation of
father and daughter, the moon and the sun, where hitting walls was the only idea of fun
Realising your own bruises when you’d wake up, and healing me with some sparkly makeup
Dibbling and dabbling with your own torment not actually realising that im not your vent
Or your toy
Or your mistake
Or the one you like to think you didn’t make
Dragging up past and blaming it on present
When the time you left is my only depressant
Thinking of what might become just makes me want to run
Because I don’t want to lose you, but then I must chose to
Leave. Before my bedroom walls start to heave and become so thin
Its as if I never had a chance to win
Over you, its as you proposed to
Let me grow up instead of find out that your body is still in doubt
Of my abilities to not remind you of mum that my genetics might not have made me like her in her tum
do you know that I know how bad you were
or think I remember just the incense and myrrh
Fitting keys into doors that aren’t meant to lock
‘daddy, why cant I wake you before ten o clock?’

Sidewinding out,
past oaks with fractal branches,
graceful drooping bower-isles
in seas of summer-blond grasses.

After asphalt gives over to reddish dust,

a metal gate shields the road from a spindly goat path,
                                                       a suggestion of a passage,
                                                        ­                      a treacherous
                                                                ­                           scratch
                                                                ­                                     on
                                                              ­                                        the
                     ­                                                                 ­                 steep
                                                           ­                                            hillside.

Peer out the heart’s window,
only scree and visions of tumbling down, down greet you.
Move the chain and open the gate, but don't get back in.
It’s time to stretch and let the driver pick their own way through.

Down, down the driveway we walk, don’t run it's steep!
and we are met with a circle of deer-cropped grass,
a curious shed claiming itself a cabin,
and a wooden house.

From the house comes a woman,
laugh first,
to teach you how to crack pine nuts,
in spite of a squirrel’s scolding.

Garlic-kitchen, rustic room, quiet in its quality.
A phone that works often enough.
A black and white tv, grey today
in favor of a window full of deer.

The dainty pink-soap bathroom tells you
a proper lady lives here.
Tole paint cheering every surface tells you
a joyous heart dwells here.  

Drowsy sunny table chatter stretches out the time.
Wooden pegs turn fidgets into solitaire.  
Veneration by languorousness compleat;

it’s

time

to

skip.

Out the door and to the right,
stop by the small pond to see water skippers dance.
Then down the path to the swinging bridge,
a slender suspension of disbelief.

Walk across the boards; you’re an explorer.
Walk onto the metal grates; you’re a spider on a web.
But try telling that to self-preservation,
balking at every jello-wobble step.

The bold bounce like astronauts on the moon.
The wise linger to look for turtles far below.
Fortune favors them both,
as all ways lead to Camp Secret.  

A worn trail threading the brush,
opens to a ferny dream.
A small stream dibbling its way to the creek,
has left behind a paradise.

Trip-trap over a footbridge
to the shelter of a grapevine canopy.
A fairy’s kitchen with a green enamel sink,
tractor seats and a *** rack tree.

Ancient stone building with a door aged shut,
On one end a cheeky wall-less loo.
Dormant spring beds in the clearing,
waiting for sleeping bags to bloom.

Craggy fruit trees form an orchard
gothic as an old graveyard.
Inviting, elegant in desolation,
but we push by undeterred.

Tracing a deer trail up the ridge,
keep clear of the poison oak.
A soundless becalmed summer day.
Perfect for a visit to the dam.

Concrete distaff, copper spindle.
Magic spun from a captured creek.
Flowing through fossily tunnel
to power the electric trees.

Winding ‘round to the other side,
a second bridge but this one still.
Wooden boards in a rusty frame.
More perilous than its swaying kin.

Hold on tight, don’t trust your feet.
Then meander with a streamlet
to the garden just beyond
the mossy, reedy muskrat pond.

High charged fence to keep deer back
from sweet roots growing deep.
Doe barn, buck barn is their place
with tools, dust and memories.

Back by the house, we slide to the terrace
where ladybugs shelter in soft mullein leaves.
The washboard shale is sprouting sedges,
a water snake kingdom by a saltless sea.