RAINY MORNINGS

Rainy mornings (or afternoons or evenings) are magical to me. My first thought when I hear thunder is actually a memory. I picture myself at an open window as a child, kneeling with my grandmother who is telling me not to be afraid, but to marvel instead in the beauty of the rain, the lightning, the thunder. I soak it all in and smile.

I love the smell of rain. If I am outside and I get a whiff of the possibility, it makes me happy. To hear it pounding on the roof is a delight. To open a window or a screen door is to breathe in life encased in wet drops from heaven. If you run outside and open your mouth and let the nectar of the sky fall in, then you feel one with the powers that be. You become drenched if it's a real downpour, the rain soaking your hair and glistening on your arms, and you feel baptized. All is new.

Right now it is so dark you would think it was dusk and all would be put to bed soon. But it is only 9:36 in the morning.

Rainy mornings now make me want to write. They have always made me want to read. I love to curl up in the corner of the couch and read a really good book that transports my mind so thoroughly that I forget about food. Of course, there's always the cuddling. But that needs its own page.

I think about Adam and Eve and that we were all meant to tend a garden and be outside. I must be very connected to that thought as I love dirt. I love to plant things in the dirt. I like to smell good dirt. I like to make it better than what it is in my own backyard by adding compost. I like to watch the things I have planted grow in front of my eyes.

I like to walk in the rain and sail in a thunderstorm. The louder, the better.

Once I was in Atlanta in a hotel room and the thunder and lightning were so loud because it bounced and reverberated off the tall buildings, zigzagging down from one side to the other, culminating by the pane I stood behind. How thrilling. I even think the hairs on my arms stood up.

Another place where the thunder and lightning were so loud was at the family farm I lived in for four years. Because the house had a tin roof may have made a difference in the resonance of the sounds of not only the rain pounding on it, but also how thunder drummed across its surface. But I think that also the low, flat fields that surrounded the house made an uninterrupted landscape for the noise to be thrown at full force at me standing in the frail protection of the uninsulated walls. I could feel the breeze across my face even as I sat on the couch due to the cracks here and there in the house. The floor was the floor and that was the only thing keeping me from the dirt below. No insulation anywhere.

To put it in the definitive words of Webster, rain is 'water that is condensed from the aqueous vapor in the atmosphere and falls to earth in drops'.

How lovely.

(c) nancy 7.13.2009