The night winter blew in it chose rain, scratching at my front window like insomniac squirrels, or something scratching to get out. This was the night I spilled broccoli cheese soup down the front of my bathrobe. This was the night I watched a movie about a person who never existed finding a self that never existed. They don’t make movies about squirrels. They don’t make movies about spilled soup. I turned down the heat, the furnace gone silent, and sure enough all of us felt a little less: the squirrels. Of course, the squirrels, and the movie stars who eschew broccoli cheese soup. And the rain bouncing off the glass to spatter my bushy-tailed longing.

Because the leaves are already dead they don’t mind falling down. Biodegradable, being gone is temporary. But raindrops are recalcitrant. Their glistening brains resist gravity, tiny versions of themselves weeping down their rainy faces. They sprout wings of dewdrops that flap them skyward back up to their cloudy beds. Otherwise they might flood or erode or bear poisonous effluvia. Give deserts cholla hope. Raise duckweed higher. Force earthworms onto sidewalks. Find themselves in our cupped hands about to slake.