Summer Rain

Days of gentle rain:  a great treat.  I walk without thought of an umbrella, feeling the seaside mist on my hair like a kindly touch, someone well-meaning, someone nearly remembered from childhood, a relative or friend.

Summer rain is cold glass, lamps lit, crawling under an old quilt and reading all the afternoon away.  A luxury of coolness and a favorite soft sweatshirt against it.  And that heavenly smell, the wetted earth.

Or picking raspberries in a wet bowl (ceramic, white) for a late-morning breakfast.  Going into town for books, for cheese and bread, for stamps, for touching base with others after days of solitude.

Playing pool once with my mother on a rainy day on Bone Lake in Wisconsin.  Having my father teach me how to hold a ping-pong paddle in Lake Lodge in Yellowstone, inside the rain.  Making a summer cassoulet with white beans, thyme.  Listening to Abbey Road.  Seeing Hadrian's Wall or the gardens at Giverny or the blue copper roofs above the St. Lawrence River in old Quebec.

Loving being inside, held safe, or out, face upturned happily rain-ward, having a small hour's adventure.
 





image:  Bridge in Rain after Hiroshige, Vincent Van Gogh

Bridge in the Rain after Hiroshige