Earlier this morning, I navigated my vehicle over a nondescript bridge (which is more culvert than bridge) spanning the width of the Seely Ditch, its narrow straight-line channel pregnant with a swollen torrent of cold water from last night’s heavy downpours; water that, it seems, has a determined resolve to ride gravity to confluence with the Willamette River where the water is subsumed.
It was only a bit later when I reflected on what I’d seen. After all, what is a ditch? It’s a human construct, yes, but more so what is it beyond its utility? The word comes to us from Old English and is most likely a variant of ‘dyke’ from the olde Dutch. This, in turn, invokes visions of Flanders and water and the purpose of a ditch, and all of this is lost in the hard history and what remains are the echoes from the past, to wit:
“If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields”
And on it goes, the flow of water in the ditch; as if those waters carry our sins to also be subsumed and buried deep in the cold dark river depths and to be carried, water-wise, farther and further downstream eventually subsuming in the brine water of the Ocean, the place from which we sprang, and completing a cycle that’s both embedded and imbedded within each of us but ever so sublimely.
Still and despite us, the taciturn rain will continue falling, cold and immutable, and beguiles each of us. For you feel the drops on your skin, hear their splat on the pavement and the tree leaves, smell that certain rain smell that simultaneously refreshes us and renews the world, and, ultimately, absolves us, and rights our metaphorical subluxation, giving each of us hope for something, anything!, more than the banality of life, and the downfall of the soul.
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