Rain

It’s raining.

Not a thunderstorm, not the edge of a hurricane or tropical storm, nothing to get The Weather Channel interested, but just a good, old-fashioned rain, the sort of rain that happened when I was a child, before the various types of rain had been invented and you had either rain or storms.

The sort of rain that meant you had to come inside, so you would curl up on the couch under the picture window in the living room with a large Tupperware tumbler of Kool-Aid and a Three Investigators book and the rain would beat on the tin roof of the porch and maybe the cat would curl up beside you and you could just disappear for a while, inside your head. 

I always loved rain as a kid. As an adult, it has been more complicated. 

There were the years when I didn’t own a car, but lived downtown and either walked or took the bus or drove my little 35CC scooter everywhere. Serious rain would cause you to rewrite your whole schedule, and there were almost always damp clothes hanging on hooks by my back door, drying out. 

There was the more than a decade when I ran an agency that worked with people experiencing chronic homelessness, and rain would destroy their belongings, ruin their essential papers, and bring sickness to their already compromised immune systems. Inclement weather meant death and destruction to people I cared about. 

And then there was the house. It was the first house we owned, a small square house with one tiny bathroom and a roof that leaked. A lot. We bought the house cheap because it needed a lot of work, and roofs are expensive, so we put off the new roof as long as we could. But it rains a lot in Raleigh, NC, so we had an assortment of buckets and pans that came out whenever it rained, to catch the numerous drips and drops. Which worked, more or less, until that time there came a huge, long rain the week we were out of town and the ceiling collapsed in the guest bedroom. That was special. 

We eventually replaced the roof, and then it didn’t leak anymore, but I still would get anxious when it rained, walking around, looking for leaks, afraid the envelope of the house had been breached. 

We haven’t lived in that house for more than five years, and I have a good, safe fully enclosed car now, and while there are still people who live outside and who are caused great inconvenience and pain by inclement weather, years of therapy and boundary setting mean that I no longer believe that solving all of that depends on me alone. 

But I still get anxious when it rains. And it’s raining today. 

This is just one of those vestigial stories that once were valuable  – that rain is bad – that sticks in my head long after its usefulness has passed. I have a lot of those – stories that once kept me safe but now keep me hostage.

Part of the work I am doing to make myself a better human is noticing the stories that no longer serve me, and trying to write new ones that serve me better. Or, in this case, trying to remember the story you knew before you replaced it with the bad one. 

So it’s raining today. And after the thunder woke me up at 4AM, I got up and spent the pre-dawn hours curled up on the couch, with a large mug of coffee, in front of the picture window in our living room with a cat curled up beside me, and I could hear the rain pattering on the tin roof over the grill shelter on the back deck, and just for a while, I just disappeared inside my head.