Old Scratch and Weather Patterns

A thin edge of storm hung over our house— leaving the western edge in full sun, the eastern half, the backyard, in clouds to the horizon. Facing the full sun a fine dense rain lowered over the neighborhood— everything slick with water. • Where did the logic of the old folktale develop, the one explaining rain on sunny days as the Devil beating his wife? There seems no apparent connection between a figure of Old Scratch and weather patterns. • Earlier today, after grading research papers, I stumbled across a web site detailing a crime scene during World War II in England. The place names and elemental images carry oddities, shadows of further folklore:
                    Witch hazel tree
                    wych elm
                    Hagley Wood
                    Wych Bury (Burning?) Hill

•133/ At night he sweeps his guilt under the bed, among loose hairs, filaments of the real, a broken wing of a blue Sunday moth, a stray patch of paper from a magazine, a plastic ring from a bottle of milk, a piece of gravel, a cooper penny, the lost button from his workshirt, the hesitancy between the telephone’s rings—
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