“We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral.”

“still other winters average their rain months into a long, cold season of relentless sog and little color. At such times, looking out through the spattered glass, I feel, deep in some spongy, unignorable organ, that we will have floods, and damage, and losses; we will have gray till the cows come home, and there will be no more cows--they'll all just rot, drown, or simply wash away. We will have rain until the very hills dissolve. And when the dirty cotton swaddling of fog finally falls away, we will all be desperate for vital signs.”

“when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.”

“The river has indeed become an inefficient conduit, but the same plaque that plugs this artery used to hold back the flow when it was soil in the hills. Now the land just bleeds when it rains.”

“Himalayans (blackberries) seize the land, gobbling acres, blanketing banks, consuming abandoned farmhouses and their Studebakers and anything left alone in the rain for five minutes or longer.”

“This sort of day makes indoor work seem shameful. So working outside, whether in the garden or the woods or on the front porch..., is a sacrament.”

“A day like this ... is almost too perfect to be legal.”