Soapbox

Rain Memories

Written for a creative writing class assignment.

The front door flew open with such a bang that my fingers jumped at the keyboard and came down on the wrong notes.
"Hey- slow down!" I called as my 7 year old son and his cousin Grace raced in off their Grandmother’s porch and headed for the TV room. "What’s the problem?"
"It’s going to rain!" Grace replied. "Look!"

I stepped to the door and pushed open the screen. From my mother’s front porch on a hill in Athens, Ohio, I had a good view of the sky. It was dark overhead and nearly black to the west. The first fat drops began to hit the hot street before me as a breath of cool air stirred my hair. Within moments, as my sisters Julie and Becky joined me on the porch, the sprinkle turned into a shower and the shower to a massive downpour.
"Wow!" I called against the cacophony of sound. "This is amazing! I think this is what the Navajos call a male rain: you get a week’s worth in about 5 minutes!"
"Remember when we were kids and we loved to play in the puddles when it rained?" Becky said, looking out.

Although Mom’s house sits on a hill, the rain was coming too fast and hard for gravity or the storm sewers to keep up, and the gutters were already overflowing. The summer air was filled with the smell of wet concrete and mud and the clean scent of rain.
All 3 of us smiled and for a moment saw ourselves in our swimsuits splashing through the huge puddles that would form in front of our childhood home during a good rain. We remembered the sheer joy of the feeling of rain on your skin on a hot day, when just being alive was a darn good thing.

"Too bad we don’t have our bathing suits" Julie murmured. I turned and gave my big sister a challenging look.
"Who says we need them?"
"What- in our clothes?" Becky asked.
"We’ll be soaked" said Julie.
"Exactly!" I grinned. "I will if you will!" We looked out at the rain, thundering down.

"Well, I will if you will!" Becky replied, but I was already pulling off my shoes and socks. "C’mon!"I yelled and dashed off the porch for the puddle that was swirling at the base of my mother’s driveway. "Don’t be chicken!" we urged Julie. "We’re grownups: we can do whatever we want!"
This struck us as absurdly funny, and Becky and I shrieked with laughter. We joined hands and began jumping up and down in the puddle, chanting,
It’s raining, it’s pouring;
The old man is snoring!
He bumped his head on the foot of the bed
And couldn’t get up in the morning!
and laughing like fools. A blur of movement at the corner of my eye proved to be my dancer sister Julie doing pirouettes and rand de jambs in the ankle deep water. (She always was such a show-off!)

Alerted by our delighted yells, the front porch was soon crowded with the rest of the family.
"Mommy- you’re all wet!" Katie called.
"I sure am!" I said and I waved to her, water streaming off my hair and the end of my nose. If possible, it was raining even harder now, so hard I had to shade my eyes just to see to the porch. "Want to come play with me baby?"
She shook her head adamantly. "Uh uh!"
"It’s raining too hard" Steve said.
"What are you made of- sugar?" I taunted. "You won’t melt!"
"Yeah, come on Barb!" Julie challenged our oldest sister. "Afraid of a little rain?"

And of course, Barbara has never been one to be left behind. She stripped off her shoes and rhinestone necklace and with a yell to put Tarzan to shame joined us in the street, kicking and stomping in the roiling water at our feet. In a small corner of my mind an adult voice tried to say something about sharp rocks and maybe broken glass in the gutter, and surely I never would let my kids jump around barefoot, but I was 7 again, playing with my sisters in the rain, and stifled that voice with another yell of laughter.

My mother appeared on the porch now, gazing at the sight of her 4 grown daughters playing like idiots in the rain while their sensible children watched from the porch.
"Mom!" we began to shout.
"Come on Mom! Come play with us!"
"Come on! Lets have fun!"

Remember when you were a kid at a pool or beach, playing in the water and shaking your head in amazement as your parents sat in their chairs or on towels, reading a book and wearing a hat of all things, and you looked at the hot blue sky and felt the water on your skin and thought, "I will never be so old that I sit with a book when I could play in the water!"
And remember those rare occasions when your father or mother, in response to your imploring, would suddenly jump up and fling themselves into the water? All the kids would race to him or her in delight, as if, in that moment, magic really did exist, simply because Daddy went off the diving board, or Mommy was doing the breast stroke. It never lasted long enough, but it was the most wonderful moment, wasn’t it?
Our 65 year old mother took off her shoes and walked down the steps into the street to the howls of delight from her children and disbelief of her grandchildren.
"Grandma’s crazy too!" they told their grandfather when he came out to see what the fuss was about.
"Yes, I expect she is" he replied with a wink.

The rain was letting up already; it simply isn’t possible for it to rain that hard for very long. We struck up a chorus of "Singing in the Rain" and began skipping down the gutters, my mother waving somewhat sheepishly at her neighbors. By the time we got 4 or 5 houses away the storm sewers had begun to catch-up and the puddles were growing small. We all trooped back to Mom’s porch where my wise step-father Larry was now waiting with a stack of towels.
"Did you ladies enjoy yourselves?" he asked as we stood dripping and shaking ourselves like dogs on the front porch.
"I must be insane!" my mother laughed and he hugged her.
"I can’t believe none of the kids came out to play" I complained.
"They were awed by the spectacle" Larry said solemnly. "You were more fun than cartoons! They can’t wait to tell their fathers." Ah, they’ll love that tale!

We dug dry clothes out of our suitcases and soon were sitting in the kitchen, eating the cookies that can be always be found at my mother’s house whenever grandchildren are visiting, and savoring the memory of the joy of being a child in the rain.
When I’m sitting in a deck chair at the pool, reading the Washington Post while my children try to coax me into the water, I sometimes remember that rainy afternoon. And every so often I take off my sunglasses, jump up and do a cannonball into the deep end.