Today we had rain. I bought umbrellas for Bill and me way back in January, when the drought we had been suffering all fall and winter appeared to be abating. It had been so long since we’d needed an umbrella, I didn’t remember ever seeing one in house or car, and when the January display of umbrellas beckoned to me in the Target entryway, I bought two.
I can’t find them now– either one of them– and this I remembered as the children and I drove onto the school parking lot this morning. I remembered it in time to realize that I was going to get quite wet as I made my way to the school building, and the children would get wet too. It didn’t matter.
We were warm in my classroom today. We are hard at work on our Shakespeare production– a small but significant addition to our humanities curriculum– and all of those bodies up and moving around resulted in someone at some point opening a window. The window remained open, but I didn’t fully realize it until a heavy downpour set in and we all turned our heads to look at it: the lines and lines of water coming between us and the trees, and the roar of the water.
But I forgot the rain again in the focus of our rehearsal, and dismissed it entirely until a short free hour, a class period during which my students were in their language classes but had left their books and folders on the desks. I was working at my own desk when suddenly the wind gusted and flipped several pages of Tommy’s open notebook: once, twice, three times. I raised my head and looked at it, surprised at first to find myself alone in the room. The rain was still coming down; the cord of the Venetian blind flapped. I didn’t close the window.
You would think I’d have thought of some of this when Everett and Emma set out on a bike ride with me after school. But it wasn’t raining when we got home, and it wasn’t raining when the boys dragged the garbage and recycling bins to the street. Despite a fully overcast sky, I didn’t anticipate rain at all until we were several backyards away from our own house and coming to the end of the trail, when Emma suggested that we not continue, that we would, indeed, get wet.
But we pressed on, and the rain held off. We had occasional little outbursts from the sky, but they did nothing like drench us. And meanwhile there was so much to see: three adolescent bluebirds glaring at us out of frowzy and speckled feathers, a creek swollen with brown and frothing water, a small carpet of rust and yellow trumpet flowers. Emma asked me to keep one of these for her, and I did, storing it in the hood of her cable-knit sweater. She kept asking me if it was still there.
It wasn’t raining. It wasn’t a rainy day. There was no reason at all to stay indoors. Everett and Emma rode deliberately in all the puddles; the backs of their clothes bore dark lines from the water that splashed up from their rear tires. And when, not far from home, the sky opened up again and let it all come down, the children pedaled furiously and I ran, not minding at all about the rain that seeped in around my ankles, that soaked the toes of my tennis shoes, that soaked and matted my hair.
Emma laughed at me from under her helmet, and when we got to the house, we didn’t go in right away. Instead we hopped over the creek to where Minnie is buried, our dear, sweet cat, who sleeps rain or shine near encroaching undergrowth. Minnie always hated to be outside in the rain, but she doesn’t mind it so much anymore.
And when I finally went inside to get the dinner ready, Emma swapped wet clothes for a bathing suit and went back out in the rain. Will joined her, juggling his soccer ball in the inclement weather and reaching, despite the water, his near-record of 91. The rain had abated when the two of them bravely set out again, but the sky soon obliged them with a renewed downpour, and Bill and I watched them, laughing, from the breakfast-room window. Emma in her navy-blue bathing suit, peering up at us from beneath dripping leaves, kicking up her heels in the rain.
