bubbles in a puddle

Mid-storm this weekend I walked around the yard with the heavy rain hitting my skin, hot from a day in the sun. There was nothing I needed to do outside, but I ambled around my house just for the cool of it. I checked the mailbox. I made sure the gutter spouts were aimed at the drainage trays. I stood in the rain. I sat in a lawn chair in the doorway of my garage and paid attention.

There was a puddle three feet from my toes just outside the mouth of the garage. The raindrops, when they dimpled the puddle’s surface, would every so often leave a bubble in the spot where they dropped. Then subsequent raindrops popped the bubbles that their predecessors had shaped. A game of whack-a-mole. A pool of self-contained play.

Bubbles in a puddle, both conjured and popped by raindrops: Making and breaking tiny metaphors.

I marvel at the nature of the world. It is a place of steady change. For the most part it is a nonchalant change. A change with soft edges. The way the day can crescendo with heat and humidity until a summer storm brews and breaks in the evening sky, punctuating the day with relief. I celebrate these rhythms of variance and change.

And still, sometimes I’m sorry that things aren’t forever.

Celebration and sorrow, side-by-side, are the substance of what it is to be human. These are the emotional barometers in our striving after joy and justice. Our hopes and efforts conjured and popped by shifting moments. Each of them temporal, tragic, beautiful, and worthy.