The rain is hypnotic like the static on the black and white TV I used to fall asleep to growing up. It was my first digital-assisted relaxation, when the programming ended and the Star-Spangled Banner played, and then it all went to hissy snow. Maybe they played the Star-Spangled Banner because they really thought it would end, or it just seemed like the right thing to do, last call…

Because it’s spring, the rain feels good: it’s making flowers, turning things electric green. It’s not the toxic, soul-eating rain of the fall or winter. This rain feels wholesome, restorative.

There is so much hair on the floor from the dog’s spring shedding, it collects on my wool socks like a Jim Henson character. I cradle fetal style on the couch against a seam of hair that feels like a beard. Hair gets into my wine. You can gather it by the handfuls and throw it out, but what’s the point? The kids pull it off the dog like cotton candy.

Drops collect on the edges of the new leaves and slide off, making the leaves wag like dog ears. Everything outside is sighing or lapping in the rain. Our old clock chimes, and the last toll rings out the way a ripple might, gradually thinning until it disappears back into the same space it disturbed. It seems the rain has stopped too, and the calendar says the moon is full, but we probably won’t see it tonight.

I step outside on the stoop in my socks to smell it: moss hangs thick on the eves like cartoon eyebrows. Everything good that’s happened to me is already gone. Anything ahead is ambiguous, and unknown. I bought an Irish wool cap at a store in a town called Mauch Chunk and told the clerk I lost the last one I got in Skibberreen, have you ever heard of it? She nodded, but I think she lied. The night guard I wear in sleep makes my teeth stick out and mouth pucker up like Freddy Mercury’s, and I lie there thinking that anything’s possible if only I believed.

Categories: Memoir, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, humor, pacific northwest, prose, short form, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer