The rain is raining
all around.
It falls on field and tree.
It rains on the
umbrellas here
And on the ships at
sea.
--Robert
Louis Stevenson,
A Child’s Garden of
Verses
You know how good that feeling is when you’re just too
grumpy to want to feel good? That’s how I thought I had made an uneasy peace
with this endless rain.
My laptop is by the window and I watched while three little
kids in yellow slickers and Wellington boots splashed in all the puddles up and
down the street. Then they stopped in my front yard where there is not supposed
to be a pond, but because of all this rain there is what kids would call--and grown-ups
dispute--a pond.
The kids jumped up and down in the pond, over and over, like
little human Superballs. One of them fell on her bottom, naturally unfazed.
Another squatted down to bathe his face like next he was going to pull out his
Playschool razor. They were soaked well beyond their skins.
Their mother watched, standing off to the side. Immediately I
thought she must be a good mother, a patient mother, the kind who does projects
with her kids and who would somehow be able to get them to actually practice
the clarinet when they were old enough to be taking music lessons.
I was not that kind of mother. I sold the clarinet. The
trombone we still have, entombed in its case and lying at rest in Linnea’s
closet. As for projects, I never liked them. They required a level of spatial
reasoning my SATs had proved I never had:
‘Where can I set the piles of laundry so that little Madeleine will have
some room to build the wind-powered generator for her Barbie habitat?’
And while my girls would have loved to become so muddy, so
messy, so deliciously rain-drenched, I was much too curmudgeonly a mom to have
let my kids puddle jump so egregiously (and almost subversively) on every
neighbor’s lawn up and down the street.
No, that’s why God made irregular French verbs—for
schoolchildren to keep busy on rainy days.
But as I sat at my computer, watching the rain-soaked
urchins, I started thinking that they looked like illustrations from Robert
Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of
Verses come to life. Of course, if they had
been illustrations from A Child’s
Garden of Verses, the very last place they would want to be is upstate New York in this
convulsive dreariness.
Yet somehow, as I watched them, my grumpiness began to
abandon me. This felt like betrayal. I had been safe and warm inside my
grumpiness. I didn’t want to think of those lovely times when I had gone boldly
and uncovered into the weather.
Like when I was in my twenties, too much in love, too young
to know the consequences of climate, and had moved to Washington state just
south of the rain forest. Yes, the rain forest. We had lived amidst flowers
that bloomed while we slept—while it continued to rain. Mornings, before I
could drive to work, I had to scrape the camellias from the windshield.
My beloved had lived in dry lands and the rain had seemed to
enchant him. We found washed away roads, the brittle edges of their blacktop
softened; we found bridges that had been built to allow for a change of course.
And all the while the rain kept a swath of cloud like gauze around Gray’s
Harbor. This wasn’t Brigadoon because it was real and from it real souls
emerged. But still it seems as far away as that.
Which may be why there was a strange and wordless comfort in
the night-black walk my daughter, Linnea, and I took last summer. When the rain
seemed neither to threaten nor stop, we left our tidy bed-and-breakfast and
made our way to the edge of a tiny harbor. There we stood, wet as clams, watching
anonymous sail boats find their shelter where they could.
Their mast-lights were all that showed, gleaming like
fireflies, but heaving in the waves like kids with sparklers on the Fourth of
July.
 |
| Heidi Caswell Zander |
The harbor was tiny; the sheltered crafts were small. And I
was not Matthew Arnold standing on the cliffs of Dover writing poetry anybody might ever
remember or decide to forget. I was simply a mother with a blooming daughter by
my side watching the pitch and shift of insecure vessels in a rainstorm. There
was nothing—not even as yet our skins--at stake.
But in the blackness, the pitching lights atop the smallcrafts’
masts reminded us that terra firma is nothing more than a cloud in our minds. Maybe
we spend our lives in a shifting search for safety--in a random harbor, or in a
neighbor’s grassy front yard, a neighbor who will bless our puddle-jumping and splashing and say, let it be.
