I wish I knew who I just wrote about.

She's a solid trunk with roots that dig with shovel fingers. She finds the water deep down.

Weaving baskets from her hair, she anticipates rain with the wet fog, the surrounding crowd of gray mist that settles like smoke on the ground.

Should I make a fire, she wonders?

The porch lets her sit for hours at rest on slightly damp pants that didn't make it through the first dry cycle in the machine. And it's too wet and cold for them to air dry. The red rocking of the chair squeaks approval at the quiet sound of ocean waves on the roof shingles. The moss cushions the drops of rain plummeting to earth. Green pincushions they are, welcoming them from the sky, rain babies sliding down the backs of bark brown slugs.

A rain barrel sits underneath the eaves as she gathers her jacket around her. The damp comes into her body without warning--it isn't that cold--as it does in the bone-chilling way of days completely saturated with all things golden gloomy. A small stream trickles down the wooden railings into the barrel, a newly made mountain spring from glacier melt. She wants to be in the forest behind her little cabin, but wonders if mudslides are a danger.

The rickety floor is slippery wet, covered with a carpet you can't find at a store. And besides, the nearest store is ten miles away down the gravel road.

She sighs, inhaling her first deep inhalation in a long time. The small leaves on the huckleberry bushes groan under the weight of gathering droplets, heaving precariously in front of her eyes. The round leaflets are delicate as mouse ears, beaten gently by the rain. They drink up the caught droplets with the morning, but until then, the mice hide in hollowed out rotting red logs and holes in the ground hidden underneath pine brush.