With
the river washes me through I walk with the road and the hillside it follows. Amazed again by the way the world answers pressure for pressure the roll of each step from heel to ball of foot to toes, answers my palm and fingers touch for touch as they rest on the bar of a gate or the trunk of a tree. Amazed by the way breath comes in from the whole sky. Rain keeps falling and now the soaked ground lets it go. After a night of downpour, for the first time since the big dam was dug more than sixty years ago, water flows over the wall; T hurries to lower the outlet and bring the level down. When the wall becomes saturated it will collapse and wash downhill all the life it holds. Everywhere, the sound of running water. And then two days of sun and just like that, full spring. Hillsides are yellow with wattle flower, flags of pollen fly from the pines, willow catkins roar with bees. The first pardalote calls, and first cuckoo. Firetail finches reappear i