Out of town on a dirt road northeast. My shadow attends trees and villages and when we crunch out together again in the open air, small drops of rain are exploding in the dust.
A long hot road cuts straight on ahead, with a hut a few hundred metres further on and another bicycle glinting as it approaches in the distance.
We arrive at the shelter almost together, the two small boys on the bicycle and me. Then the rain really comes, brushing across the rice, over our shelter, over a family digging, fully clothed, for something unknown in a lotus-filled pond, on towards the near trees and pagoda spires that make the horizon a close ring around the three of us.
The downpour thickens, seems to reach a perfect pitch on the roof of the hut. The breeze angles it further in and puddles work across the floorboards. We shuffle around to stay dry. The boys start a game on the ground underneath. One pulls a jumper over his skin. They give me barely a second look.
I move around this world as a grinning mute. No language, no firm grasp of culture, no feel. Just bumbling and trying to convey my harmlessness. The working landscape – these rice fields, the waving family, those two white harnessed cows standing rock-like with water to their knees – is a painted backdrop. I admire it and at the same time obscure it.
But suddenly, just now, for the fleetest moment, the three of us sheltering there, I feel joined. In place. I see the world more clearly: I see a frog dash across a pond to lily pads, tiny yellow body hunched like a an old man, arms held out in front, an explosion of desperate, outsized energy.
I notice something else, bend closer for a look, scuff at it with my shoe. Intriguing; it is contentment. I am here, and can stay here, I need be nowhere else, no-one expects me. I am dry. Cool. Safe. Not hungry. The two boys are company also.
After about 10 minutes the rain moves off over the fields and the scene burns with heat again. I begin to depart. The boy with the jumper takes it off. They leave and I cycle back down the road, the way I have come.
Posted by zukointheworld 
