It’s raining again. Why does it seem the weather waits until I have a day off and then rains? It’s not all bad though. I happen to like rain. There was a winter I spent in Vancouver and it rained at one point or another for 28 straight days. It was an inconvenience but a welcome replacement for snow. When it rains the grass always looks greener and the streets are always cleaner. As a boy I would take my tricycle out in the rain and put the front wheel in the mud between the road and my house. Then I would spin the tire until it made a deep impression. The next day I would go back and see that it had hardened. When it would rain next (within a couple of days in Michigan) I would make an identical mark next to it and count how many days it rained that month. Keeping track of it in my head seemed impossible and writing was not yet part of my repertoire. Back then my mother didn’t work outside the home. She had seen too many people grow up afraid of the rain and not celebrating it. There was a huge tree outside our front door that provided a great deal of shade. We would pack up my little lunch box and a sack for her and have rain picnics. The ground was almost entirely dry and the rain in Michigan usually just came straight down, sometimes in a drizzle. That meant the ground under the tree was dry and we could sit and watch the puddles grow or the cars splash the water off the road. It was glorious. I would run around under the tree. All my siblings were in school, so it was just Mom and me. We didn’t need to go anywhere or spend money or anything fancy. She helped me appreciate the rain as nothing more than a change in the weather. Naturally, if there was lightning we would sit inside the screen door and fight the dog for a view through the glass. Moving to Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto) and living in a fourth floor of a condominium sort of took some of the Christopher Robbin out of the rain experience for me but I would prop myself up on my chest of drawers to watch the cars travel down Dundas Street. It was there that I started “Quest for the Red Sapphire” on a rainy day. My grandparents owned a cottage on the north shore of Lake Erie in extreme southern Ontario where we moved after Mississauga and the start of Dad’s health problems. The house was only about 20 feet back from the break wall where waves would crash during a storm. There was a three-season porch facing the lake. My mother would brew a pot of tea and we would sit on swings and watch wind, lightning and 10 foot waves crash outside. When the waves hit the wall the water would shoot up like in the air as high as the second floor of the house. As we sipped our tea she would sometimes sing (her voice was opera quality and her major in college) or I would tell her a part of one of my books. She was fascinated by the details and always wanted to know more. Sometimes the rest of the family would join us and then the singing and my book telling would stop. No one else seemed interested in her singing or my stories but we welcomed them all the same. Everyone would tell funny stories and occasionally sad ones but we would all marvel at these tremendous storms that must have terrified sailors while we sat on our swings and drank our tea. So you see, the pitter patter of rain drops outside my window today is nothing more than an old friend stopping by.
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