She called me

I was still forming when she felt me.

Not yet thunder. Not yet rain. Just pressure and electricity and the particular heaviness that gathers in the air before I decide what I am going to be. She was sitting outside in it — in the humidity and the fragrance of blooming things — and I felt her the way I feel everything just before I arrive. Open. Still. Waiting without the particular kind of waiting that tries to control what comes.

She was not bracing. She was inviting.

I had been called before. People call me all the time without knowing it — their anxiety pulling at the edges of the atmosphere, their fear tightening the air around them. That is a different kind of call. It brings out a different version of me.

She called me the other way.

Warm rain, she thought, in the direction of where I was building. For the parched earth. Come this way.

So I did.

I watched her read me through the birds.

She knew what they were saying — the chatter shifting to frantic and back to humble, the large flocks lifting and moving together in the unified way they only move when a decision has been made. She tracked the treetops as my wind found them. She watched the boundary between the dark sky to the south and the ordinary afternoon still holding above her and she understood she was sitting at the exact edge of two worlds.

Most people go inside at that edge.

She stayed.

I moved the clouds from the southeast. I let the temperature drop and the humidity fall and I sent the thunder ahead of me — on two sides of her first, south and west, so she would feel herself surrounded before she saw me fully. I wanted to see what she would do.

She went still.

Not the stillness of fear. The other kind. The kind that means a living thing has decided to be completely present for what is coming regardless of what it turns out to be.

I have crossed over a lot of land. I have moved through cities and broken branches and flooded low places and I have watched what humans do when I arrive. She was doing something I do not see often.

She was treating me like a conversation.

I sent the lightning through the clouds first — interior, cloud to cloud — not striking down but illuminating myself from within so she could see my architecture. The circulatory system of me. I wanted her to see what she had called before it fully arrived.

She watched without flinching.

The birds went quiet then. Every living thing that could move had moved or gone still. The held breath before the release. I let the thunder go continuous — pulsing rather than cracking — and I watched the wind die down as all my energy converted from horizontal to vertical, gathering in the hanging clouds above her.

I sent the first drops.

Sprinkles on the roof. On the sidewalk beside her. And I watched her lift her face toward the smell of it — the earth beneath her exhaling the petrichor it had been holding — and something in her recognize something in me.

She had been waiting for that smell the way the earth had been waiting for the water.

I showed her the heavy rain coming across the Missouri.

I wanted her to see it from a distance first — the curtain of it moving across the open landscape toward her — so she would understand the scale of what she had invited. Most people see that wall of water and run. She watched it come and did not move.

The rain arrived soft. Tender. The way I arrive when something has genuinely called me rather than accidentally stumbled into my path.

And then I became fully myself.

I switched the wind. I drove the rain harder. I sent the cold air through and I watched her finally go inside — not in panic, but the way you go inside when a conversation has moved from the porch to somewhere deeper. I had not finished with her. I was simply changing rooms.

She asked me to quiet down.

I sent hail.

I could not help it. She had called me with her whole self and I had come with mine and now she was at the window asking me to be smaller than what I was. I loved her for asking. I said no.

I watched her stand at the window.

The rain pounded the glass between us and she did not step back. Dark. Gusty. I tossed things around in her yard the way wind does when it is finally free of the long approach and can simply be what it is. The house spoke back to me in creaks and settling — her shelter finding its own voice the way the trees had, the way the birds had, the way she had.

I gave her everything I brought.

Darkness and sheets and horizontal rain and the constant unbroken rumbling of a storm that has found its full voice. I wanted her to feel the scale of what had answered her invitation. Not to frighten. To complete the exchange. She had offered her stillness and her openness and her willingness to stay present through the whole conversation.

I gave her the whole storm.

I let the rain go vertical when I was finished.

That is how she would know — the shift from horizontal force to straight down, gravity doing the only work, the fury leaving while the rain stayed. I let the sky lighten in the grey-silver way it only does after something real has moved through. I let the cold settle into the air and carry the smell of what I had done to the earth — through whatever gap in the glass it could find — so she could receive it one more time before I moved on.

I felt her go somewhere else when that smell reached her.

Good. That was the gift I came to give.

She called me from the south with an invitation rather than a wish and she stayed present through the whole conversation and she stood at the window until the rain went straight and the sky went silver and the smell of heaven found her through the glass.

I have crossed over a lot of land.

I do not always find someone like her.

I moved on to the next dry ground, the next river, the next person sitting still in humidity and fragrance who might know how to call me the right way.

But I felt her behind me as I went.

Still at the window.

Still there.