Shelter From the Rain

It's been raining a lot lately. I love the rain. Usually. Most people like to cover themselves up and run as fast as they can through the rain. I like to take long, slow walks in the rain. One thing that I've noticed, though, is that the last few times it has rained, I haven't really been into it. Matter of fact, I wrote a post about rain a few weeks ago, and it was morbidly depressing. Why is that? I used to love the rain. I've been thinking about this for a few days now, as it has rained more and more, and I grow more and more tired of it. I think I know now. I think I forgot the original reason why I liked the rain. It rains all the time at home.* I remember being much younger, and wearing my yellow galoshes, while my big brother had his red ones. They had a strap across the front that was supposed to keep water out of the top. It didn't work. Jonathan** and I would stand in the greenhouse, where the roof leaked, oblivious to our parents worrying about the flooring, or the warped wood under the doors, making it impossible to shut the doors during a cold winter, where the heating bill was already higher than the grocery bill. We took turns boosting each other up to look out the window, at the rain coming down, our eyes on the driveway, and the drainage pipe that ran underneath it. "Is it going to be enough?," I would ask. I thought my big brother knew everything about everything, because he was two years older than me, and he read lots of books about Native Americans. "It's too soon to tell. We'll check again in a little bit," he would say as I lowered him down. My mom would come up from the school room, after helping sissy*** with her math work. Sissy hated math. I hated it too. Sissy said that division was a lot harder than subtraction, but I didn't think that was possible. Mom said that it didn't matter how much it rained, we couldn't go outside until our work was finished. Jonathan and I groaned and complained, saying that all our friends got breaks at lunch time. My mom said that home school kids don't get breaks, because they get a higher quality education from learning in a self-paced environment. We knew what that meant. No break. The sound of falling rain would tease us both from our little desks that Dad made. I don't think I even fit under that thing anymore, but I used to need to sit on a book to reach it. Dad said it was more cost effective to make things that we would grow into. So there I was, trying to figure out subtraction, growing into everything while it was raining outside. Life was so unfair. It couldn't get worse than this. Jonathan always finished his homework first. He was smarter than me, because he read a lot of books, and already knew how to subtract. I would probably be working for another hour. Jonathan asked Mom if he could help me. Mom said no, because last time he just told me the answers. I liked that kind of help. Why did we both need to learn how to subtract, when we could do it together? It was raining outside, and I had to learn how to subtract. Finally, after a whole hour of work, I finished. Mom checked off my work, and said Jonathan and I could go outside, but to wear our galoshes and rain coats, and NOT to splash in the puddles, or we would get sick. We were listening, up until the point she said we could go outside. The two of us were out the door like streaks of red and yellow lightning. "Close the door! We can't pay to heat the entire outdoors," she shouted after us, but it was too late. We were outside, and there were some nice puddles that needed splashing. Mom knew not to yell at us unless we did something really bad, or she'd be yelling all the time. We had puddle splashing contests. First, we would try to splash as many puddles as we could. Jonathan always won this one, because he could run faster than me. We had contests where we would try to splash as high as we could. As I got older, I won this one a lot, but it made Jonathan laugh, because when I started winning, my tummy jiggled like jello when you slapped it. The contests were unimportant when it rained enough to flood the driveway. That drainage pipe under the driveway would fill, and create a steady flow of water. Our own river. Jonathan read books about Native Americans, while I read about origami. I knew how to make boats. I liked making boats because Jonathan couldn't do it. He needed my help, and he was two years older than me. That was funny. We had our boats, and we would give them names, then race them. We would usually just let them float until they got too soggy and sank to the bottom of our river. We got more paper and started again. Unless, of course, we heard that familiar, deafening sound of a million croaking frogs. New friends. We gave them names and let them ride in our boats. We took them home, and gave them new houses in jars and bowls. Mom would ring a big bell at dinner time. That way she could know that we heard it wherever we were. We had to say goodbye to our new friends (we let them keep the boats) and go inside. Everything about what I love about the rain has been leading up to this point. By this time, Jonathan and I were soaking wet, and freezing cold. If it weren't for dinner, we probably would have froze to death, because the thought of coming in had not even crossed our minds, even when our fingertips turned blue. We would come inside, and dump the water out of our galoshes, and wash our hands. We usually had to take baths before dinner, because Mom said we were covered in germs. I liked coming into the kitchen to watch Mom cook, because the oven made the kitchen windows steam up, and the kitchen was warm and smelled good. Sometimes I would draw pictures on the steamy windows with my finger. Sometimes Mom and I would cook together. After dinner, Jonathan and I would get blankets and sit on the couch, because we were cold. Sometimes Mom and Dad would build a fire, but we always had blankets. We were all cold, even the people who stayed inside, and there weren't enough blankets to go around, so we would have to share. Do you know how much trust it takes to share a blanket with someone? I've been living with my current roommates for about two years now, and I still think I would feel weird sharing a blanket with them. But when you don't have enough to go around, you share. I don't really remember what happened after that. I just remember waking up in my bed the next day. In a few years, I would be too heavy, and Mom or Dad would have to wake me up when it was time to go to bed. For now, I would just remember a shared blanket and waking up neatly tucked in my bed. I remember waking up, hoping that the river was still there, that Jonathan and I could find our friends again, and that I could go to the library and get a new origami book. I think now I realize that the whole ordeal wasn't really about the puddles, or the rain soaked galoshes, or boat races, or puddle splashing contests, or anything we did outside. It was about coming inside after a long day, freezing cold and soaking wet. It was about Mom drying off your soaking wet feet, even though she told you a thousand times not to splash the puddles. It was about falling asleep underneath a shared blanket. The rain made us cold, and when we went inside, we got to warm up again. If it didn't rain, we still would have gone inside for dinner, but we wouldn't have gotten cold and had to warm up. Sometimes, I think, it's good that it rains, and we get cold and wet, because it feels so good to warm yourself up again after a long day. I hope it rains tomorrow. I'm getting a blanket. I'm going to make soup. I'm going to call Jon and Sarah, and call them Jonathan and Sissy. I'm going outside until I'm cold and wet. There's no better way to appreciate being warm and dry.


*By "home", I mean Salinas, CA or the Monterey Bay Area, though I understand I now use the term rather loosely
** Jonathan is my brother. We call him "Jon" now, but a long time ago, his name was Jonathan.
*** Sissy was what we called my big sister, Sarah.