I never used a scythe until today. Evening saw Áine and me on the slope just outside the garden fence, mowing the tall grass with these curved blades. The thrush, thrush, thrush of falling stalks, a pause for breath or to wipe sweat from a brow. Áine worked on the slope below me, haloed by the late light as the song of us, thrush, thrush, moved cross the hill. Sun sank, playing in the clouds heaped in the mountains across the valley. The field at my feet was a miniature rain forest, worlds of insects hopping in a hundred direction with every swing of the blade. Thrush, thrush, thrush. "Doing this, you see how destruction can be satisfying," Áine said. Thrush, thrush. Our host farmer, Paola, had snapped off the head of each stalk, gathering the season's grain. The bare stalks now fell before us, until her son Andrea came up yelling, "Dinner ees ready!"
Later, with the mowing was done and my belly full of pasta, I went out to get my sleeping sack off the clothesline. Above the steep slope of the garden, a cloud mountain glowed white. Sun long since down, it was star time, a time no white should still be. White as if lit by moonlight. Then it pulsed. Lightning lit the cloud from inside like a heartbeat. Internal relief of billows and curves. No thunder I could hear, just rustling corn. The cloud beat with silent light, a self-contained world of — "electric storm"? I didn't even know the name for what I watched so long, laundry forgotten in hand. After a long time I apprehended that it was expanding. With slow force, like plate tectonics, like breathing, it built itself. I climbed further up into the garden to look at the mountains. Dark clouds blocked them, but in the valley there were human lights. Turned once more the the silent brilliant storm and, in gratitude, came in.
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