an inundational, infatuational, and mostly successful problematic

I am north west of Sylva. I've been reading far too much Ed Abbey. Less than a mile from the road to Cherokee. To Asheville. I am in the center of the southern Appalachian mountains and I am content.

It has just begun to rain and it is a beautiful, soft rain. The rain drops which penetrate the canopy fall on ferns and set them in periodic motion. The rain soaks into gametophytes and into the dead logs on which they live. There is the sound of thunder rolling here and there, muffled by the mountains, by the forest, by the moss, by the wet logs. A soft thunder. Not the startling, crackling, tornadic thunder of south central Indiana. This thunder is pleasant. This rain is pleasant.

No tornado siren accompaniment.

It has been very dry here, apparently. Drought conditions exist east over the Balsams toward Asheville as reported in the Citizen Times. For some reason I believe I sense the mountains, the forest, the trees, the moss, the lichen, the low creeks, the dry creeks, the trout, and the beetles supine with mouths agape drinking lustily of the falling water.

She is clearly in a tough spot and I wanted nothing more than to hug her and hold her, but that might be misunderstood. That might be taken for an advance.

But wouldn't it actually have been one?

The delicate balancing act that is navigating the social landscape prohibited tenderness at that particular moment in time, that particular place in the landscape, that particular juxtaposition of face and face.

And what a beautiful face is her's. She cups her chin in her hand and awkwardly knocks her glasses askew, but does not seem to mind. Her hand retreats, she krinkles her nose, flexes her soft, round, well formed cheeks in an effort to restore the glasses to their less than natural prescribed perch.

I want to eat her all up.

And now it has stopped raining. A tease. Merely a tease. The thunder murmurs something unoffensive in the distance.

The beetles and lichen are not happy. I can tell.