Summer Rains

Rain in summer has a different smell than winter rain.  The kitchen this afternoon had a fresh, watery-green sort of smell, clean, cold, almost crisp. Yet the rain seems colder in the summer, perhaps because I expect it to be warmer.  I am reminded of travelling to Runcorn when I was a teenager, the sense of wet darkness to the hedges, overgrown and shaggy.  Dark places, full of summer glooms.  I have always understood the Green Man myths.  

It has rained on and off for some days now.  I was in Kington this afternoon trying to squeeze a water butt into the car, with no luck.  The garden is sodden and every bucket is out collecting water.  Then this evening the clouds cleared and there was a vision of far away clouds, brilliant white, like the distant Himalayas.