It’s Raining, It’s Pouring

The old man is NOT snoring, but oh how it is pouring. You can see in my tiny video below the view from our apartment. We are wrapped in a cloud. It is a relief from the heat, but after so many days of rain the city is saturated.

I found myself remembering rain in Indianapolis when I was a child. It rained a lot, especially in the summer. I loved to take off my clothes and run in the rain and feel the squishy mud in the cracks of the sidewalk. I would push it up between my toes and lift my hands and feel the rain running down my back. I remember vividly when Mom decided that I was too old to take off my clothes and run around in my underwear and I was so mad about that. I loved the feel of the rain.

I’m not sure what happened to change that. Gradually I began to associate rain with clouds, darkness and dreariness and it made me sad. I know Dad felt that way and maybe he just “rubbed off”. Maybe it was the headaches I began to feel shortly before it began to rain. (To this day my head is a great barometer. The pressure changes and my head starts to ache). Maybe it was the inconvenience of having to walk to school in those awful rubber galoshes that made huge welts on the back of

my legs where they rubbed. Or maybe it was the icky feel of wet pant legs clinging to my skin all day long. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my wavy hair that I worked so hard to keep smooth and straight became short, curly and frizzy in the rain. I don’t know what it was, but I knew I didn’t like rain and I definitely didn’t want to live anywhere where it rained all the time.

In the last couple of years, however, I have come back to a new appreciation for rain. I attribute that to the fact that the rain brings cooler weather and more than I hated rain, I hated being hot! So I have made an executive decision: let the frizzy hair come  (that’s why they invented flat irons!), throw out the galoshes and wear sandals, roll up the pant legs (or better yet, wear skirts), take a couple of Advil, turn on all the lights in the house, but best of all, turn off the air conditioning, open and windows and smell the rain and sing, sing a song.

I like to hear the rain come down;

Pitter, pitter, pat.

I like to hear it hit the ground

Pitter, pitter, pitter, pitter, pat.