Nobody, Not Even the Rain, Has Such Small Hands

It was a day that ranged far and wide. We ate out. We shopped. We ran errands in town. We watched the fog come down over Mount Nittany like a cloak, and lift again. And after all of that, I zipped on my bike over to my favorite pond in the Barrens to see how big the latest rains had made it.

The precipitation was done for now, or so I'd thought. I had checked the online weather map before leaving the house: no precip showing for a couple of hours. Good. Time enough for me to go and check things out.

I got to the Barrens and parked my bike, walked over to my pond, got out my sitting pad, sat on the ground, and just looked at the pond. Studied it. The water was fuller than usual but not as big as I've seen it. I did not spot any amphibian motion; did not hear any frogs.

Suddenly, a tiny bird flew past me, very fast. I heard behind it the much larger form of a hawk that had been chasing it. The big bird landed heavily on a nearby branch, sat for a few minutes just out of my sight, then flew away. Just a quick visitation.

As I sat there, I saw tiny circles begin to form on the water. What was that? Rain? Just a caress on the surface, really. Not even rain, but something less than that. A light drizzle, nearly too small to notice. In a few minutes, it was done.

It was nearly musical, soft as a whisper or a sigh. Bruce Hornsby might have called it a Mandolin Rain. But a line came to mind from an e.e. cummings poem to describe the gentle caress of tiny raindrops that yielded concentric circles and patterns on the water surface: Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.