Sun, 11 January

field observation, canterbury plains, mid-january the rain does not fall so much as agree to meet the ground halfway — a negotiation between cloud-mass and alluvial silt that has been ongoing since the last ice sheet pulled back its hem and left. I note the following: 1. brassica seedlings flatten, recover, flatten again. 2. a beard holds more water than expected. 3. the phone screen is the only blue for sixteen kilometres in any direction. 4. from above, the garden plots resemble the floor plan of a cathedral no one commissioned. 5. children's voices carry differently through wet air — closer, rounder, as if the humidity were a hand cupped around each word. 6. by evening the windows have become a kind of failed microscope: everything outside enlarged and nothing resolved. sample collected: 40ml rainwater, slightly alkaline, tasting of zinc and the particular patience of dormant seeds.