March 15, 2017
Rain, rain – go away! Come again some other day.
It is raining and rainy. So, yeah, what else is new? I live in the PNW (Pacific Northwest) … it ALWAYS rains. Well, that’s not really true but during the winter (and fall and most of spring and well, yeah, early summer) it rains. And rains. And RAINS.
And I can’t say that is actually accurate, either. Because while we say it’s “raining” – it’s not really “raining’. It’s more like heavy misting … or dribbling or drizzling or showering or some such thing is going on that drops water, of varying quantities, from the skies. On the radio today, while driving my 20 year old van up island, I marveled at the weatherman’s creativity in his report … “Thursday we’ll have storms, Friday showers, over the weekend: intermittent drizzle and rain. Next week we’ll see a mixture of precipitation and “heavy moisture.” … and as he went on about the forecast, one thing was very clear. It didn’t matter how many ways he said it … we’re going to be WET!
Rain, rain – go away! Come again some other day.
We all know the sing-songy nursery rhyme about the old guy bumping his head…
“It’s raining, it’s pouring. The old man is snoring. Bumped his head and he went to bed and he couldn’t get up in the morning. Rain, rain – go away! Come again some other day.
I often wonder why we sing these horrible songs and read these horrible nursery rhymes and fairy tales to our innocent children! We’re singing about this guy – who somehow bumped his head. What? Should we be concerned? Was he looking out the window to see if it was raining hard? Was he looking for an umbrella to go out and get his mail and while doing so cracked his noggin on the door frame? Should we be calling an ambulance? Does he have a concussion? Did he perish? Do we need to notify his family? It’s these things that keep me up at night.
When I was a kid I was sick with all sorts of usual and unusual illnesses. I had your garden variety of head colds and far too many ear infections but then I had the hospitalizations for textbook maladies and oddities known only to those who, I assume, knew of them from other textbooks from the Dark Ages! I had so many “itis-es” I’m surprised my folks didn’t trade me in for a newer, illness-free model! (Thanks Mom and Dad for not doing that!)
Which simply boils down to … I was home a LOT as a kid. My homework was brought home by my neighbor and it worked out. I didn’t flunk 1st grade (or 2nd or 3rd). I did however flunk several of my classmates who so graciously (forced is more like it) made me such nice get well cards. All the girls I liked drew flowers and Troll dolls on them and their printing was perfectly perfect. I graded these cards (yes – like a teacher grading school work!) and gave all the girls A+++ (unless I didn’t like them and then they got Bs) … and most of the boys got C– or Ds or Fs. There were plenty of Fs.
On many such days of being homebound, I listened to a Peter, Paul & Mary album (their 1st actually). Vintage vinyl for all you youngsters. On the “stereo”. My mom played albums all the time … Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, the Hatari soundtrack, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. But it was the Peter, Paul & Mary one that I loved most. And they sang, in beautiful folk-songy three-part harmony, the “It’s raining” song.
Rain, rain – go away. Come again some other day.
I’ve always loved the rain. Well, let me rephrase. I’ve always loved the rain … until I moved here! Yeah, this has kind of spoiled it for me. I used to look forward to rain. Not anymore! As a really little kid, too young for school, I’d pop open a red umbrella with a ceramic painted elephant head as the handle (think Mary Poppins’ parrot umbrella, but not talking and an elephant). I’d lie on the aqua and black checkered couch, nibbling on buttered rye toast, watching Captain Kangaroo under my red umbrella – my legs too short to even hit the crack between the cushions, the halfway mark on the couch. No, it wasn’t raining inside the house. But having the umbrella open was like cozying into a little fort all my own. It was wonderful. I wasn’t singing the go away rain song then!
When I lived in Colorado, our home faced west over a large park towards the mountains. It was lovely. We’d sit on that covered front porch and watch the storms approach … kind of akin to the Black Death that descended onto the first born in the movie, The Ten Commandments. We’d watch the clouds pour over the mountain tops and cascade down the eastern facing fronts. They’d billow and roll as they approached and the layers of mountains would disappear in puffy gray batting. We’d watch the lightning zig zag across the sky. If it was a hot night – it was purely heat lightning – and the electricity sparked through the pink and lavender skies with sideways fingers of light. If it was an electrical storm, the bolts would shoot down from the sky and reach the ground in white-hot flashes – sometimes pulsating once or twice – and we’d count … one, two, three, four, five … how many miles away was this storm?
We could always smell the rain before it arrived. Luscious. Earthy. Cleansing.
But here I don’t get those visuals or smells or sounds as we are in a forest and the ground is always wet. Soaking. Saturated is more like it. Even when we have that elusive sun break – everything from roofs to grass remains just WET. Water, water and more water.
Rain, showers, drizzly, mizzly, drippy, misty, stormy wetness. I miss the “old days” of rain. I miss Peter, Paul and Mary. And I wonder about that guy who bumped his head.
Rain, rain – go away. Come again some other day.