It’s like the sultry summer days when I lived in Montreal, heat so thick your skin’s running with sweat,and all your thirsts want slaking. You’re heavy with desire and you want to do something about it but the sun’s pressing in relentlessly and your will is liquefying and really all you can do is wait: wait for the humidity to build, wait for the humidity to break, and then….
First there’s the thunder – the clap, the flash, the weighted brightness – and then comes the rain. You’re standing out in it, lying out in it, feeling it patter all over your body like a thousand darting tongues; touching, tasting, quenching the heat of you, until you sigh and subside and gratefully dissolve.
Those were the days, and this is one now, although in this case the thunder is a low rumble rather than a violent crash, and the sky isn’t dense purple but medium-grey, and the rain isn’t filling the hot street with warmed flooding water: this is a Scottish summer, more temperate in all its aspects. Yet still the heat comes in, still the rain insists.
Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
13th June 2023