an eleventh reflection...'river'

I’ve been living down by the water so long now it’s like I can tell the rain.  I can read the brooding anvil clouds, I can smell the rain coming.  It’s what happens when you’ve so much water so close to home.  When I lie in bed I can hear the river run by the house, some days gushing like a light, virginal mountain stream, other days, after the rain, roaring and rushing.  I am a fisherman but with only so much line, I’ve been without proper work for a year.  But I catch fish and eat them, at least when the river isn’t so high.  I’ve a gas-light stove and I cook the fish on there, wrapped in old foil.  Living down by the water, you have to get used to the old ways, let the river run through you.  There’s no telephone and my nearest neighbour is three miles up a dirt track, so the pace of life is the river, and the water that flows in her, or somedays surges up her banks.  She’s burst a couple of times, and I’ve had a basement full of her, but bailing her out is something to do when I’m not writing, or fishing, or watching the sky and the clouds morphing shapes, the sky about to rain.  Rain on a river is a special thing to see when the river’s quiet and slow, a humbling thing too: in a sense that’s all I am, rain on a river, disappeared into a great, ever moving body of water as soon as I arrived – in a sense we all are.  Living down by the water, the river knows, she knows and is the best company a man could want for, if you let the river flow.