Rain. Anticipated rain. Planned-for-on-Saturday rain.
My two younger brothers and I tell our parents on Friday, “We’re going for a walk Saturday morning.”
The ritual is set from prior outings: Arise while it’s still dark outside, the rain pelting the storm windows.
On Saturday morning, my brothers and I dump our flannel jammies on our beds and dress in silence. I pull on my wool coat, tie on a scarf and tug on red rubber boots over brown oxfords. My brothers slip into slickers the color of school buses and black galoshes with buckles. Careful not to waken our parents (not realizing until adulthood that they listened for our exit), we ease out the door and close it with a light click. We whistle to our dog to join us — he’s protective enough to snarl at strangers who get too close.
A streetlamp sheds puddles of light on the sidewalk. We slosh down the street, explorers in a strange world. Not a light in a window, not a sound except for rain tumbling through leafless tree branches. The rain eases to a mist, beading across my bangs. We feel as alone as if piloting an ocean-going vessel. What excitement!
So many blacks and grays to discover — the dense black outlines of houses, the thinner black of tree trunks, the wispy gray-black of bushes. If the soundtrack for a rainy, gloomy, spooky movie is Bach organ music, heavy on the bass notes, our foray into the mist calls for Chopin and Brahms, performed on the piano with a flute accompaniment.
Down the gravel road, another discovery — the world’s biggest mud puddle! This monster dips so deep we take turns slogging through it, the water level so high that if anybody kicks up wash, the puddle slops inside our shoes.
With my imagination in overdrive, I report to my brothers that trout swim in the upper levels. Salmon glide below in deep waters, waiting for the pull of upriver creeks and warmer weather before spawning.
The fish are hungry. Feed them. First the trout. We grab handfuls of gravel and spray the puddle, raising dimples across the surface. Next come the salmon with their hearty appetites. We scour the roadside for boulders, some so large it takes two of us to lug them to the puddle’s edge. One and two and a swing and then PLOP — the splash rises up like a slow-motion study of magnified water droplets.
The water turns from the color of hot chocolate with melted marshmallows to brown and thick as fudge brownie dough. No one asks about the nutritive value of rocks. These are our fish. My imagination knows what they need.
Now muddy as well as wet, we continue our excursion through the dark, the wind increasing and rain sluicing from the north. We stagger on, searching for the grail, that moment when light softens the horizon to the faintest touch of gray. A lamp flicks on in a window, followed by the distant hum of tires on wet pavement. Time to head home.
We tumble into the kitchen, which is now warm and light and fragrant with bacon frying and waffles steaming on a platter. How do our parents always know the moment we will return?
We drop our coats in the utility room, heel off our boots, wash up and head to the kitchen table. We bless the food and then we all talk at once — so many stories to tell, and “please pass the maple syrup.”
The understanding seeps into me that if I hunker down inside, waiting for sunny days, I’ll miss a lot of adventures in life.
In the afternoon, my brothers and I shoot marbles around the living room rug and stack blocks into villages. We pause when the mailman delivers a letter from extended family.
Before we lived in this land of Douglas fir forests, sword ferns, seagulls and slugs, we lived where they reside — the land of sagebrush, meadow larks and alfalfa fields embroidered with irrigation ditches. Every year they lament water worries, and this letter recounts the same concerns.
A past summer, we visited them. Irrigation canals, their waters deep and swift, feed into the ditches — canals that parents warned could grab a child and not let go until the victim turned limp and cold as snowmelt. We avoided canals. The smaller ditches running down fields and gardens provided mud for squishing in bare feet. The irrigation company hired a ditch rider and, like a modern-day Moses, he parted the waters by turning valves at the head gates.
Mother reads us the letter. No rain in their foothills. Scant snow in the mountains. They aren’t sure what to do if the moisture doesn’t come. It’s worse than last year. Maybe sell lambs early, and a cow or two. Hay crops suffer. Less milk to keep cool in milk cans lowered by rope into the irrigation water.
With rain pounding against the house vents, I feel guilty about our abundance of liquid wealth. Even with my imagination, I cannot fathom how to divert rain to them. Not wanting them to feel badly, I write back: “The weather here is fine.”
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