rain

The Rain that Day

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

There’s a scene in one of the Hunger Games films where Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are sitting in the doorway to their house. The shot is from deep inside the room and we can see them almost silhouetted on the floor leaning against the door frame looking outside where a heavy, steady rain is falling. It’s summer or fall. The door is open yet and they seem comfortable, and it is raining. 

That image stayed with me. I want to call the director and say, “Well done,” you nailed one of the most comforting images I can recall–inside warm and dry away from the storm but close enough to appreciate it. 

I loved sitting on the patio when I was a child, under the canvas awning when it rained, and I just assumed it was raining everywhere, which at eight years old was probably a three block radius. What did I know of everywhere? But that closeness of rain never left me. In Spain on more than one occasion we donned our raingear and walked out onto the Camino to keep going, a heavy fog sometimes filled the air, and on one day near the village of Cee on the way back from Fisterra to Santiago, we couldn’t even see ten feet forward. But here I am eleven years off the Way and I remember that day as if I just walked in the door from the path and set my walking stick against the fireplace stones. 

What is it about the rain? 

On a trip to Ireland, the only day out of ten it rained was the very day archeologist Michael Gibbons planned to give us a walking tour of the Renvyle Peninsula in Connemara just along the Wild Atlantic Way. We went anyway, along roads and across bogs for a half dozen miles, and sometimes it was only cloudy, but more often a steady Irish rain fell as more of a pleasing accompaniment than any nuisance of weather. In fact, when we walked near an abandoned home we stood under the eaves to wait out a downpour and during the short break we laughed and joked with each other about nonsensical things, but it is the time from the walk we remember most, the moment we all took pictures and realized how stunning the Irish Pete could smell in a rain, and how we didn’t mind, not in the least.

I took a moment just now to look up the history of rain, already knowing the first evidence dates back 4 billion years, and the first mention of it in literature dates back to both Gilgamesh and The Iliad. What I didn’t know until just now is that raindrops are not shaped like teardrops but more like hamburger buns, that one inch of rain over one acre of land weights over 110 tons, that Mawsynram, India, is the wettest place on Earth with more than 450 inches of rain annually, and that rain really does have its own odor, called petrichor, caused by the wetness releasing the oils from plants and soil which then fill the air. 

“The beauty of the rain is how it falls”

–Dar Williams

I love the smell of rain, the feel of it on my back and neck, but my reason has little to do with any enjoyment of being wet, soggy, drenched; it is because I can, because I am here in nature still, well after so many I love have closed the door behind them, all of whom if they could would love to be drenched in the rain with me, and we would laugh at being here, alive, and I’d say how moist I am and we’d laugh even harder. 

I love feeling alive and rain does that, even if I’m just on the patio at an old picnic table sixty years ago and the sound on the canvas above me and the steam off of the sidewalk nearby all kept me present, absorbing the moment before the next one came. How often in life can we be so acutely aware of a moment so that we can hear the nudge of the one that follows? Time is too swift for rain; life is too short for the subtle rise of mist from the pavement. 

“Let the rain kiss you, Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops, Let the rain sing you a lullaby.” –Langston Hughes

It’s the same with the sun, the feeling-alive thing. The heat and scorch on my neck and back energizes me like nothing else can, and everything around me is hyper-present, like I can feel the molecules, the very atoms of the light, and too of the rain, like the coursing of blood. 

It’s raining now, and I’m going to pour a cup of tea, put on a sweatshirt and go sit on the porch and listen to the rain in the woods and on the porch roof here at Aerie. I’ll let my mind wander and try and remember the last time I heard my father laugh and remember the last time my mother and I talked about nothing at all. I’ll think about Eddie and that time we walked all day in the rain through Heckscher State Park on the Great South Bay, just two fourteen-year-olds who suddenly owned the planet, and we spent all day out there and sang “The Long and Winding Road,” and now when I hear that song I think of rain, and Eddie, and how it always takes me a moment and a shake of my head to understand that day was fifty years ago, forty-five years before he closed the door behind him, and how that rain that day was like a third friend laughing along with us, singing along with us. When it rains now I can have that day again, and I like that. So I walked up here to my desk and settled into this chair and I’ll listen to the rain on the skylight before I turn out the lights. 

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet”

–Bob Marley

Sundays

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A steady rain is falling along the Chesapeake today, and the sky is grey all the way upriver to the west. The clouds are low, and late-November leaves lay like wet carpet throughout the paths here at Aerie. It is cold.

I startled a heron earlier; she was hunkered down in the reeds on the edge of the marsh so that neither of us knew the other was there until the last minute, and she let out the familiar low honk as she lifted into the trees on the far side of the water and settled onto a high branch, then she immediately pulled her head down low into her body, and it was raining harder so she turned to face behind her, toward the woods, away from the wind.

The only sounds this afternoon are the rain on the water, a slight wind in the few remaining leaves, and some fishing boat through the low fog at the mouth of the river. It feels like November out. It feels like a Sunday.

When I was young I lived in a yellow house on a reservoir in central Massachusetts. This time of year I would sit at my kitchen table and look through a wall-size window across the grass and past the road to the water, and the leaves would have long been gone, and it would rain like this, or snow so that even the roof of the Old Stone Church out on Wachusett was visibly wet. I worked on a manuscript about Vincent van Gogh back then, and the late fall, early winter mood fit the subject. Days like today I desperately miss my small place, the chill coming down from the mountain reminding me of colder months ahead.

It’s lonelier here than it was there, but I don’t know why. Maybe it was more hopeful back then, and hope can certainly chase off loneliness, almost always. At least there it could. Sometimes I’d walk around to the near shore of the reservoir in the first snowfall and watch the Canada geese move by, or the occasional car come up the road from West Boylston, headed perhaps to the cider mill in Sterling, or further to the summit at Mt. Wachusett. Or sometimes I’d wander across the street to the Deacon Bench Antique Shop and talk to the workers, and someone would have brought in a dozen Country Donuts from down in town.

Up in Princeton on days like this I’d stop at a small, white shed-size store, a deli of sorts, and buy hard rolls and the Boston Globe, and I’d return to my small living room, also with a window looking out across the grass to the reservoir, and I’d read the paper, spreading it out on the plaid couch, on the wooden coffee table. I’d have already put a chicken with spices and cut up red potatoes in the oven, and it felt permanent, as if it was all designed just for me.

The Chesapeake is choppy today, and to the west the deep grey clouds announce some inevitable harder rain and cooler temperatures. I thought about heading down to the raw bar in the village to watch a game but opted to spend a little time here at my desk. I have a box of pictures behind me, and I thought it would be the right kind of day to go through them, get rid of the redundant ones, put some of my favorites in the albums still with empty sleeves. I might not pull it off the shelf again, but I will today since it is raining, and it’s good to remember other times like this when there was something more than weather in the way the raindrops hit the surface of Wachusett. Something more melodic than today’s rainfall, which seems to simply drown itself in the river.

Instead, I stood at the water for a while and watched the current, noted the incoming tide, felt the cold rain on my face which rather than dampen my mood seemed to massage my melancholy back into something akin to anticipation, to expectation.

Am I wrong to think Sundays have always been like this is some way? It’s as if the colder months were designed for Sunday afternoons, the sound of rustling leaves, a chill on the back of the neck, the familiar call of some announcer analyzing the passing game, commenting on some player’s career.

And there will be an instant replay so that we can experience it a few more times before moving on, noting what worked, what didn’t, anticipating the fourth quarter with just a small stabbing of regret for some of the plays we will never run again.

Done Too Soon

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It’s forty-five degrees and rainy today. Two days ago it was eighty-four and sunny. I think snow is in the forecast this week; that, or triple digits. I can’t keep track. Nor do I care that much. It’s weather; I like weather. Whether it is collar up, teary-eyed, runny-nose, bone-vibrating cold; or sweat on the tip of my nose, prickly heat, brow-dripping, sun-burning hot. Either. I’m good. Middle ground works best for being most benign, of course; those New England type, low-humidity seventies with the air-clarity of New York’s Southern Tier, the colors of the Sonoran Desert, and the salty-scented wind of the coast. Everyone loves autumn or spring weather. “Pleasant” they say. Mostly because it doesn’t hit you in the face.

I don’t mind a little headbanging with the elements.

Anyway, it’s raining now. So I’m inside, physically, mentally, psychologically. Like a grocery-store lobster, like a termite, like Kenneth Graham’s Mole, like the malted part of a malted milk ball. That’s me—I’m inside today. I will go for a walk to the river, stroll up Pintail Road past the pond to the dock; I’ll abandon the warm here at Aerie, finish first my cup of hot chai latte, all steamy and frothy.

I have a game I play when things seem down, dark, or otherwise non-descript and boring. It’s actually quite effective: I imagine I’m already dead.

I imagine I found out that time is short—a feat not difficult to imagine these days as several people I care for very deeply no longer have to imagine this; it is real. But I force myself to imagine hearing the news, the disbelief followed by denial and then anger. Then somewhere before acceptance I imagine the rain.

I remember the streak of wet up my back when I was a kid on the island riding my bike after a summer shower. Or the choppy Great South Bay splashing at my knees when Eddie and I would walk along the rocks of Heckscher. I remember Spain, the Camino back from Finisterre to Santiago, and that day it poured the entire time, and a fog settled ahead of us, and we were soaked, but we were so alive, finding small medieval chapels where we stood under the overhang and listened to the far-reaching quiet of Galicia. We found an albergue and changed clothes and walked to a pub and played foosball and had some local brew.

The rain was a visceral reminder we were alive, right then, a drop-by-drop pronouncement of existence. Rain doesn’t reach the interior walls of anyone’s sarcophagus. It is solely for us, for those here, those of us still alive and aware.

And then I imagine the sun.

I remember the heat while hiking Sabino near Tucson, deep pools of mountain water to dive into after my body was dripping with sweat from heat. Or the cold, the uniquely-desert-borne cold feel of my skin when I turned under a cliff into shade and the dry air dropped twenty degrees. Once, in Senegal, in the southwestern Sahara, I fell asleep on a cot in the yard of a house in a small village, and the heat woke me up. I went to the porch and the thermometer in the shade read one hundred and ten. I can remember my shoulders, the tingling sensation when I lightly rubbed my palm across my skin. It caused shivers to run down my spine.

Alive. Absolute clarity.

So, really, so I’ve stoped bitching about the rain, or the cold, or the heat.

Or about anything really. I am alive.

I’m at my desk and above me rain is pelting the skylight tonight. Out the window the deep woods are misty, and I can’t hear any of the normal wrens or even crows. Just the sound of rain and the distant rumble of tires out on 33 more than a mile away. If this clears out before bed, I’ll go out and look at the planets and the stars with the telescope and deep-space binoculars and it will be cold, upper thirties cold, and at first I’ll move from foot to foot, bouncing to keep warm, until some sort of numbness settles in, and I’ll breathe hard on purpose to watch my breath, and my neck will feel wet and cold, and I’ll remember this part of the night as much as I’ll remember spotting Vega or Alpha Centauri. What contrasts! The billions of years ago presence of stars and the immediate dripping reminder of the right now.

How often are we aware of our existence? I mean, how often are we conscious of the beauty and sensation of our life? We go through motions, we dress so we can’t feel the warmth or the cold but who doesn’t love the cold feel of our bare feet on the grass at twilight? We eat so we feel the nothingness of not being hungry, but to fast once in a while is to cleanse our minds of the monotony of food. We don’t connect to others because we find something familiar in the airgap lives we lead in a world where whatever is most convenient works best and connections back to those we knew is so much easier than reaching out to those who just might be in our lives moving forward.

But back to the rain,

my God the rain slaps us, and this is what makes our lives on this earth unique. In the distant unfathomable reaches of eternity both behind us and yet to come is a nothingness and never ever againness that stretches without end, in a state of seemingly complete unexisting. But here, now, we shiver, we sweat, we stretch ourselves to shake off the stiffness, and we wipe our eyes, throw some cold water on our faces, shake off the drowsiness, and live.

Because now is all there is left. As one dear friend of mine recently commented about “passing”: “Then I’ll close the door behind me.” This is it. Make no mistake, this is it,

and still people avoid the cold, avoid the rain, the sleet and snow, the blazing sun, but those extremes make us aware of the present. Humanity’s most vulnerable trait in shunning the passing of time is its apparent need to remain numb as much as possible. Meanwhile, if we tolerate the rain we can see droplets of life on the beautiful flowers outside, shake the wet from our hair, catch some drops of life on our tongue.

Am I being a bit mystical? A little too “earthy”? Damn right. But just how much time being alive have we lost by blaming weather? The atmosphere can be most inconvenient, it seems. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Move on.

“I hate the rain,” some say. “I hate the heat” some say. Sure there are legitimate reasons to abstain from constant weather-beating. Asthma, sensitive skin, and other issues.

But no one should ever miss the experience of the sound of rain on a lake. The blinking away of snow from your eyes. The vertical streak of sweat down your back on a hot day. No one should veer around the puddles. Let that water rip up your back and even the back of your head. Honestly, you can change clothes and dry off, put on warm clothes when you get back inside.

We are dying, my friends. Some soon, some not so soon. So let’s go for a walk in the rain. You and me. Let’s stand on the lawn when it snows. We can sit on a bench in a park when the sun is so strong we will feel it in our veins. Because at some point, whether we are ready or not, we will wish for one more rainfall. We will pray for another soft blanket of snow. We will trade the best of our days for one more season, whatever season it may be.

The weather is the closest we come to recognizing the immediate. And the rain says, quite softly most of the time, “Come. Fill up your senses.”

Truly. There will come a time when we understand that all of it–the lashing of rain and the drifts of endless snow–will be behind us, whether we wish it to be or not.

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice
Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart
And Genghis Khan
And on to H. G. Wells

Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din
Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth
And Alexanders King and Graham Bell

Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler
Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo
Karl and Chico Marx
Albert Camus

E.A. Poe, Henri Rousseau
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman
Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too

And each one there
Has one thing to share:


They have sweat beneath the same sun
Looked up in wonder at the same moon
And wept when it was all done
For bein’ done too soon
For bein’ done too soon

–Neil Diamond “Done too Soon”

The Rain

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The View from my Office Window

It has been raining steadily since early this morning, and it’s in the mid-fifties today, going toward sixty or more by Tuesday. This reminds me of the rainy days when I was a child and I’d lay on the den floor and watch old black and white westerns all afternoon. I enjoyed seeing the blazing western Sun and the sweat on the cowboys’ foreheads all the while our yard swelled from hours of torrents.

Like today. The leaves are somewhere between summer and winter, with carpets of amber and red running the length of the driveway and all along the Aerie trails. Even the porch, which has remained dry because of no winds today, has scatterings of leaves right up to the log walls and on the furniture. The river is calm, and a slow endless hum of rain on the surface is both peaceful and somewhat melancholy. Sometimes when the riverfront is barren and the mist rises from the storm, I can hear some faint call of kids on innertubes, or the distant grind of a jet ski passing out toward Parrot Island. It reminds me of those beach sounds when I was young, on the Great South Bay or at Point Lookout on the Atlantic, and some music drifts from the blankets of other family’s, and the low murmur of adults talking about some trip to the city while kids yell from the surf break. Those sounds are my life’s soundtrack; they are embedded in me as much as the sound of my own voice. Sometimes some nearby transistor radio would toss over Ralph Kiner’s voice announcing a Mets’ game, and I’d tune into that while laying on my stomach on the blanket.

But today’s connection is the rain and how it sounded on the awning in Massapequa, or how it sounded in the trees of Heckscher when Eddie and I would wander the trails not minding being soaking wet, not minding the ebbing of the days of summer and fall.

That was then.

Now, the rain comes in steady streams then lightens up, then heavy again, but never stopping; not today. Outside my office window here across the driveway is nothing but woods for quite some distance, and if I look out long enough I can usually see deer, even in the rain, and opossum. At night in the flood of the porch light I can see the fox at the edge of the woods nosing her way in wet leaves looking for apple cores I leave out. She will eat a few, then she will mouth a few to bring to her kits. I have never seen her den, but I imagine it is not far and is fairly dry—or at least protected from the weather.

Today I did nothing. Earlier, I caught up on writing classes and finished an article for a deadline and then organized the area around this desk, but once that was done by late morning, I did nothing. Today is the day I decided to undo myself, neatly put my pieces spread out on the floor, clean off each one slowly, clear out the buildup from years of neglect, and then carefully put myself back together. So the rain is good—it is cleansing, it is like some late autumn baptism.

Once classes are done and the leaves have fallen and the cold air comes on, undoubtably taking me by surprise again, I will clear the leaves off the driveway, clear the paths by raking the leaves into the woods, and get the firewood ready for winter. The house is well-heated, but I like fires in the stone fireplace. It feels safe, though I’m not sure why since I never really feel threatened by anything. Still, there seems to be a difference between not feeling any threat and feeling “safe.” I know at least one person knows exactly what I mean.

In 1981 or ’82, a friend of mine and I took a van to Rochester from college to pick up a piano he bought for his campus apartment. He worked for the university. On the way home we stopped at Letchworth State Park and hiked for a while, then we stood next to the stone wall which overlooks some waterfalls. It was autumn, and the leaves were at their peak. It was like standing in a state of Grace; it was like stopping time and all civilization could breathe better. We talked about music and other normal early-twenty-year-old conversations, and then after some time of quiet, he said, “You ever think about how every year we pass the exact moment we will die?” I stared at him a minute and said, well, to be honest, no—it never crossed my mind—until then. He laughed and added, “I don’t mean that in a morbid way, but if someone died on November 10th at 11:12 am, then every year before his death he passed that tragic moment not knowing its significance.”

I made some jokes about morbidity and how he managed to bring down what had been a really good moment, and we laughed for a long time. We even sat in the back of the van and played the piano and sang while a few other tourists stood by and listened. It was a good day. Before we drove off, he said, “I guess it’s just that sometimes I wonder how many autumns I have left. Probably a lot, sixty or so maybe. But who knows.”

That was exactly forty years ago, and I’m glad to say he is still with us, though we lost touch a long time ago. But we’re both in our sixties now, and we are closer to 100 years old than we are that afternoon. So there aren’t a lot of fall days left to enjoy this suspension of seasons; this literal “change” of nature.

And so I too have decided to change. I need—must—let the old ways slip off and fall away and gather at my feet before I continue this pilgrimage. No doubt it has been beautiful—in the big picture I have had one hell of a string of seasons in my life. But it seems like a fine time to go dormant and get back in touch with my roots a bit, understand again where I was going to begin with.

The rain stopped about two paragraphs ago. It is dark grey still, and the moment of what would have been a sunset if not for the grey skies has passed, so it is getting dark. I’ll put the porch lights on soon and look for the fox, most certainly I’ll see some opossum. I’ll sit on the porch a while and have some tea and for a little while I’ll notice how beautiful the fallen leaves are having served their purpose, having made way for the new leaves to come.