The View from Villa Flores

…Some Rain Must Fall

But, please, not so much!

“The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually.” Eeyore, Pooh’s Corner, A.A. Milne.

After three days, the rain here in Puerto Rico doesn’t seem to be stopping. It will, of course, eventually, but not before causing havoc in low areas all over the island. It is hard to say why it is happening — climate change, perhaps, since a few precipitation records are being broken. The metropolitan area has been invisible for days.

I remember a fragment of a song we sang in grade school in praise of Pennsylvania when I was a child: “There is beauty in your mountains, there is peace among your hills….”

There is peace and beauty in the mountains and hills around me here, especially right now when dark clouds and fog have blanketed Villa Flores and rain is enameling flowers and foliage with silver and studding them with diamonds. The rest of the island and the rest of the world seem to have ceased to exist.

Nothing looks the same. Objects far fade. Moments are myopic. A diaphanous darkness glides along the distance. One has to look within.

I wandered for an hour with an umbrella in one hand and a camera in another. I was onstage again, an actor in an obscure play. Clever lighting brought strong objects, once familar or ignored into phantasmagorical full view, but only momentarily. I captured what I could.

Up close, familar foliage shimmers in the liquid light. Afar, trees in the ravine become tapestries.

Patterns painted by ethereal light create new plants from old. Bright blossoms conquer the distant gloom.

“Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves that all of life is not black and white.” Jonathan Lockwood Huie.

Nor is it all Technicolor.