June 11, 2026: Rain

At 2 or 3 yesterday afternoon, the sky grew exceptionally dark, which I only realized because my office grew exceptionally dark, and the clouds outside had mustered up their nastiest thoughts and were looking about as evil as clouds over Lisle ever look. Then there was thunder, and the rain came down in torrents. I wrote the boys to see if the windows were closed. I asked if someone might give me a ride home later, so I didn’t have to bike in this, and then I regretted it, imagining the boys driving through this ocean falling on the moraines and waterways of the western suburbs. Even as I texted them back (no need to come! The rain is stopping!) water was filling the gutters, rising halfway up car doors. Minutes later, it was sweeping cars into the DuPage River where they rotated slowly downstream, bumpers knocking against fallen trees on their way toward the Desplaines River, lodging half-submerged or, if they were lucky, floating all the way to the Mississippi, thence to the Gulf of Mexico.

None of this happened, of course. Instead, I met and talked with my staff about papers in progress, projects, and specimens to mount as the rain tailed off. I walked out of the building at 5:15 with a colleague, and we talked not about the rain, but about data and genomes and conferences and manuscripts and all the things that occupy the frontmost 90% of my mind. I biked home uneventfully, racing against a rain that did not return.

Lou was making supper when I arrived home, and David and Lucy were running out for heavy cream and black pepper, which I’d forgotten to buy over the weekend. Brooklyn was giddy with all the activity. She wore herself out within a couple of minutes and laid down by the front door, where she spent most of the evening. We ate a delicious meal together, had good conversation, ended with ice cream, and then all went our ways.

Rachel and I talked on the phone while I made a fire. I wanted something to dry the evening out a little bit, and a fire does the trick. I read the 25th chapter of Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. So much life in 10 pages. Big Ammachi is pregnant, 15 years after her first child was born. She and her husband sit, quietly, which is how they always sit, unless she is talking. She asks, “Why do you speak so little, my husband?”

He answers wordlessly by lifting and slowly lowering both his eyebrows and shoulders. Who knows? She shakes him in annoyance. It’s like trying to shake the trunk of a banyan tree… “I never learned to read,” he says at last. “But I learned that ignorance is never revealed if one holds one’s tongue. To speak is what removes all doubts.” You aren’t ignorant! You’re wise, my husband. His confession sits between them in the friendly twilight. She puts her arms around him as if to enfold him, but she can no more do this than wrap her arms around [the beloved elephant who frequents their home,] Damodoran.

She gives birth. Her husband begins to have headaches. A year after their son’s birth, the husband has a particularly awful headache and vomits violently. Then the headache disappears as abruptly as it came on. But it leaves one side of his face drooping. Over the course of a few months he begins to act strangely, loses sense of what is going on, does not recognize Damodoran. He scratches at the ground in the courtyard for no obvious reason, stands up and seems not to know where he is. One night he and his wife bicker, which they never do. He picks at her, is unkind, which in more than 20 years he has never done. They make up. Big Ammachi goes to bed, and while he sleeps, he dies. She is angry, resentful, sad. After a few weeks, she can hear the sounds of scratching their courtyard. She steps out to face the sound and talks to the spirit of her late husband. She asks forgiveness. She forgives him. She wishes him to be at peace, and then she listens. “She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.”

The rain began again, and I headed in to sit on the couch with Brooklyn and the cats. The rain fell on and off for a couple of hours. Brooklyn and I retired.

We got out for a walk after sunrise, the temperature still cool. The rain had transformed the neighborhood into a Richard Adams landscape. A perfect field mushroom sprouted from a neighbor’s immaculate lawn over night, the only non-grass you might notice if you didn’t lean in close to find the few violets and alsike clover lurking in the turf there somewhere. Its head was as round and perfect and bleached-handkerchief white as it will ever be, unaware of how blistering the sun will be or what it feels like to be nosed by dog. A small rabbit took note of us, silent, then darted between the houses to alert the others. Robins were singing everywhere.

We headed east on Otis Avenue and crossed Fairview, walking downstream. A solitary American toad was calling from the wetland at the bottom of Otis, where water from east, west, and north converge, pool, and then dive into the stormwater system to head, I believe, southward into St. Joseph Creek, where they trickle and burble and, sometimes, gush through our neighborhood. Aa friend informed me yesterday that baby toads were on the move, some coming right into the building. So cheeky! A red-bellied woodpecker trilled from the north. An eastern wood pewee sang from the trees to the east. A flicker made a long, extended monkey-call from the southeast, followed closely by a hairy woodpecker whinnying. Brooklyn and I made our way slowly around the schoolyard, stopping for every smell and puddle. We covered little ground.

We meandered home on Douglas Avenue. Inkcaps had sprouted up in fresh mulch beneath a tree. Catalpa flowers had been knocked to the ground by the rain. Japanese tree lilac flowers were splashed across the sidewalk: immaculate, mouse-sized pocket squares with stamens still attached.

We came home, made tea, and I wrote for an hour, which is where I find myself now. Making the bed earlier this morning, I pulled out from beneath the covers my copy of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, in which I find this passage that I underlined and starred 32 years ago:

People think that the totality of their knowledge depends on the nature and capacity to be known of the objects of knowledge. But this is all wrong. Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing.

The sidewalks are dry, and I’m heading to work now. I’m hoping baby toads sneak in the back door with me.