Rain, Rain . . .

I've never liked the rain much, but since it hardly rained at all last winter, I've actually been craving it a little. I mean, I really enjoyed those long weeks of crystal-clear, blue, blue skies even though it was freezing, but give me a good storm with rain falling on the roof in buckets so heavy you wonder how the roof stays up. I always hate coming in from the rain chilled by wet socks and heavied pantlegs and soggy shoulders, but there is something nice about changing out of those clothes into something soft and warm and fuzzy.

There's a storm out there, and I just came in from being outside, and you can smell its heavy, earthy fragrance. Tonight as I was closing class with a soft oroshi, I said, come on, let's try to call that rain out from the sky. Do you know what smell I'm talking about? As a kid I remember saying once: it smells like rain! But my Mom was quick to say, no, that's the smell of the pavement. I guess as someone who grew up in Hawaii, she knew what real rain smelled like. But as a child of the city, with its miles and miles of cement and asphalt and roofs painted with hardened black tar, the rain smells like that to me. Stony, and porous, and filled with the latent heat of hot days and dry winds and the sounds of lazy cars passing by and the shouts of children and of August lawnmowers and the scrape of a rake on the sidewalk, papyrus shards of newspaper caught in chainlink fences, of small, forgotten, flattened shoes, all saved up, all ready to be released again by the rain. I know all too soon I'll tire of the leaden grey skies, its depressing horizons, of winter's brief, monotonous days of softened shadows and numbed toes. But give me a nice, big storm. Give me rain measured by the inch and of sudden 3 pm blackouts. I'll take it--for now anyway.