I think sometimes it’s the stillness of heat more than its actual sensation. But then when I think of stillness I think also of rain, because people stand still on its peripheries, looking in at it. Then the moment when it has just let up and we let the dogs go outside, opening the glass door they’ve been leaning on. French rain I had thought once to be the most emphatic, the most rotund, with its droplets that don’t simply fall and wetten but fall and make contact and multiply so that the shouldered part of your shirt that managed to edge out from under whatever awning betrays the two drops you felt and leaves you sodden and laden, so that you try to pull inwardly away from the smacking sleeve. Then I went to Zimbabwe knowing already everything Conor had told me about the rain there – such heaviness and such straight drops that I expected them to slot through the ground. Very few words actually come to mind when you decide it’s time to write about the things you love best or the times you felt the most inundated. As now, when I try to describe how unrelenting the drops, how sheer their gravity, possibly you would think me shallow. Talk of the Falls might be easier and their layer of wet like a could separating, walls you think will be like your childhood mist and disappear when you try to enter them. But you can walk through them, and stand inside of them. Impossible there sometimes to tell the difference between the spray rising up from the river below – the river which is in a rage, and the rain that you think you’re desperate for, that you think would cool you and make you capable of another stretch of walking. But the rain too is hot, and the spray seems to have basted you for cooking after the initial loveliness of sliding on your belly toward the edge and moving your face around inside its backlash.  And because of this to and fro of moisture the ground around is all forest; leaves like animal tongues and branches drawn above like nets. There are trees that grow into bulbous hives and sit like fertile pods by the path, seeming very alive, and trunks that fall under their own labour to block your way in one heavy, permanent swing. These trunks the children straddle and have their picture taken on, the lenses being wiped between takes.