The rain fell torrential last night, hard and pounding, transforming the earth into sludge. The fallen leaves blocked the culverts and made wide deep puddles in the streets, flooded onto driveways, forcing a running start and my longest leap at the narrowest part of the water to make it from the street to the curb.

I could hear R & Jesi in the old house, mizmar horn and tabla drum drifting from the radio on her refrigerator out into the night, eerie and out of place in the sagging old house, overhanging trees catching the shadows and the sounds and the rain and releasing the fused droplets onto my hair.



We danced, practiced the most difficult part again and again, the part when we all come out of a spin, let our momentum carry us into a hip circle to the left, then a spiral up to the chest, and then a chest drop, which transitions into a chest circle and a sideways travel. We all can execute the movements; it’s the synchronization that causes us problems. Especially since it follows a spin. It’s barely two beats of the music, and if we fail to time it perfectly nobody will notice, but it would be nice to take the whole choreography we’ve worked on since September and nail it. Hard. Like the rain.