Notes from the wet season

It has rained for nine days.

Not the polite rain of the south. This is the full Queensland wet: rain that arrives like a decision, that roars on the roof so loudly you have to stop talking, that fills the gutters and the creek and the low paddock until the whole world tilts toward water.

Time behaves differently in it. Mornings and afternoons blur into one long green dusk. The frogs never stop. I’ve lost track of what day it is, which, for a writer, is very nearly the point.

What grows in the damp

Everything grows. Mould on the books. Ferns in the downpipe. A fungus on the back step so luminous that at night it glows faintly blue, and I have taken to sitting beside it with a notebook, the way you’d sit with a candle.

Stories grow too. Something about the enclosure, the house turned into a small boat on a dark sea of sound. I’ve written more in these nine days than in the previous two months. Most of it is strange. All of it is wet.

A small list of things I’ve heard

• A tree frog that sounds exactly like a dripping tap, until it doesn’t.
• The creek, in the small hours, making a sound like a crowd of people very far away.
• My own name, once, on the wind. (It was probably the wind.)

The forecast says it will clear by the weekend. I find I’m almost sorry. There’s a story in the low paddock, I think, sitting just under the surface of the floodwater. I’d like a few more nights to listen for it.