The Hissing of Winter!

     Slugs and bugs, snails and trails and I'm about to drink the water drops that fell upon the lettuce leaves overnight.
     Rocket greens, grow out toward me as I reach and pluck their flavour. Every tiny seed sown has germinated, flourishing with vigour and laughter when it rains. I can watch it growing. Throughout the winter it thrives to meet the mint. Wait until spring and it will try hard to outsmart the rocket, providing digestible leaves of love - a refreshing salad each day if necessary - tea that tastes of impeccable impishness, exploding with fragrance and aplomb with these freshly picked leaves of affability - mini explosions of summer in a mouthful. 
     Mint is everything at once, enhancing any salad, impossible to do without. The chocolate mint I have indulged in, turning a plain old cheesecake into another life. Pots of basil mint have also stood me in good stead a few years, never owing as much as a tiny leaf, shrinking back over nights of harsh frosts, but its roots coming alive in spring, shooting forthwith without fail, its loyalty assured.
     When I visit my best friend's garden in England, I wander to the borders, around which the hedges of West Dorset grow high and wide. All the varieties of different mint flourish with unrestrained vigour -  for I put them there. I need my fix of mint when I visit, but she doesn't thank me for it, when they take off into the hedgerow banks amongst pale blue geraniums, foxglove, beech and oak. Spearmint grows at the base of the beech roots, while apple mint rubs shoulders with the last of dying foxglove clumps - it is September and they have flourished in the lanes during June and July, when summer is at its height.
     It rains well in England, hissing through a summer's day as well as in the winter. If cold enough it turns to snow, falling with large fluffy wet flakes that sit on the end of your nose. If the temperature dips enough below freezing, the snow may turn to drifting power - like cakes, the trees and hilltops are transformed with a dusting into a winter wonderland, from which it's difficult to extract yourself - so pure, brightest white and beautiful beyond measure.
     I heard the hissing of winter rain through the air last night, unrelenting as it cascaded down the window - each drop in competition with the ones next to them - ravishing the soil below with wind-rippled moisture. 
     Walking through the park next morning a red wattle bird calls with its familiar sound, high in the branches of a bare silvery birch tree. Its call unmistakable, while the creek rushes on toward the sea, singing with gurgling glee. 
     The golf course was soaked, it heard the hissing succinctly - but neither the creatures from under the ground or high above would hear it as I do. - tapping on the roof, trickling down like miniature streams in the valleys, until it drains and is lost to the sea.
     Winter can charm the brain, lull the mind, its cold may chatter the teeth, but when the hissing of winter rain subsides, the dawn breaks still and quiet, the sun will always rise, its rays lengthen, wrapping themselves lovingly around you, feeling of lingering warmth it brings, till winter turns to spring, horizons full of promise.