The first morning after rain always feels different. The air smells of wet earth and forests, and even the simplest streams seem to carry the weight of memory.
On those mornings I have often found myself pausing, listening to the river’s restless pulse, watching the water shape the land as it always has, as it always will. In these fleeting moments, small creatures and rushing currents reveal the rhythms of a world both enduring and impermanent. It is here, between memory and movement, that I notice how the familiar and the strange intertwine, and how every passage—whether of water, train, or time—leaves its mark on the weathered landscape of our lives.
This is another from the archive, the receipt is was written on suggests circa 12/7/2019.
The train is due on the first morning after the rain.
I hear the stream even before I begin to cross it, not the gentle meandering sighs the ducks and I are used to.
Brown water is impatiently pushing its way to the river, like a tumultuous wall to wall carpet of mountain memories. Docile bends are being reshaped.
A family of ducks is conserving energy in one of the more sedate elbows, having been swept down further than they probably wanted. The silver lining for them is the absence of Pukekos, their mortal enemy in the battle for riverside dominance.
The smell of rainforests and mountain air draws me back to earlier decades when leeches and cassowary were possibilities, and ancient trees stood like regal sentries guarding the secrets of Country.
In this newer land, I am enthralled by the silver water made brown. Life rushes beneath my feet as billions of molecules bound in the power of a moment.
An impromptu stolen moment in a day that will try to sweep me up,- make me move to someone else’s flow. And in this moment of pause, I begin to wonder…
Will I be a duck who finds shelter, the rock that makes the water go around it, the Pukeko biding time? Perhaps I will be the grass, temporarily submerged but destined to dry under a gentle sun.
The train has pulled away from the station.
Angele Toomey Poetry 
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