# 40 Windshield

Windshield.

When I shut off the wipers the windshield began beading heavily, forming a view of the parking lot as if through a lovely curtain. The heavy rain was from a March coastal nor’easter. I had turned the radio to the classical station, while traveling a short distance through city streets. I was amazed to hear familiar notes, Vivaldi, lulling me into the loveliness I thought was one of the Four Seasons, Spring, I thought as the equinox was two days before.

I sat in the parking lot watching the muted outlines of people walking in and out of the store in time with the music they could not hear. The cars moved about in similar rhythms astonishingly in synch with the strings of the orchestra. Time ceased. There was only the music and the blend of perfect rhythmic movement, a spectacular sense of both being outside of time or place, so perfect and perfectly simple, moments of reverence from within a stormy, ordinary day.