The Old Man is Snoring...

It's raining!!!!!


Yay yay yay... and some more yay yay yay's. I LOVE the rain. I love it when it just sprinkles, when it pours, when it spatters or mists or gushes. I love the rain. It feels like a new start, every time.

The rain I am used to is often warm, very rare, and either very light or too powerful to actually go outside into it. It often involved hail, broken windows, and flooding. But this rain... this rain is steady and consistent. It is something to trust in. It is daddy rain. It feels safe, like I'm in a cocoon and the rain is the walls around me.

I don't exactly know why I love the rain so very much. But it calls me. I want to play in it, get wet in it, fold paper into boats and sail them down the gutters like I did when I was small. I used to play in the rain in the States. But I think this rain might be too cold. So I stare out the window at it and pretend that I'm in it.

One of the memories I have as a younger person involves the rain. It is a memory that is so lovely and precious to me that I have built on it, and I know now that what I remember is more than what there actually was. But it doesn't matter to me that my brain has taken it and made it more... it is a lovely memory. It is an important memory. I don't have to remember the truth. I don't want to remember the truth.

It was a weekend, probably a Saturday afternoon. The sky was dark grey and overcast, clouds hanging heavy over the top of me. It was raining, a persistent drizzle, perhaps a bit more powerful than what it is raining outside my window now. But it, too, was a daddy rain. The rain and the low clouds were an unbreachable wall between me and anyone and anything else. I was in my room, my pink room, my neat pink room where everything was perfect. There was no one else there. I was sitting in my window, on a thick cushion covered in pictures of pink Victorian roses. The light from the fixture on the ceiling was warm and yellow, the kind of light that pulls you into its arms and holds you close. It was just bright enough to define the walls of my room as the walls of the world... and past that was the rain.

I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be with. No chores, no homework, no yelling or fists, nothing. I think I was 10, perhaps 11. Maybe 9. Does it really matter? I was at that age where there is no other time in the world. What was right then would always be. Every moment timeless. I was not so small to have to wish that I was bigger, but not big enough to long to be grownup yet. I was just... me. I was in that moment, cuddled comfortably on the window cushion, leaning back against the wall behind me, with my feet tucked up and warm underneath me. I was holding a book in my hands, some old hardback tome which gathered the warmth of the light and pushed it into my hands. I was reading in spurts, in the tick tocky silence, interjecting the story with glances out the window to remind myself that the wall was still there, that I was really still safe, that it was real.

The smell of ozone that only seems to come with the rain in the Southwest was there, and it was a clean smell, one that didn't exactly fit in the warmth of the room, but instead emphasized how held I was by the safety of the warm light. It was good. It tingled my nose when I breathed in, almost painfully. I was alive, it told me. And the world was good. In the moment of my awareness of exactly how tingly alive I smelled, the dry musty scent of the book I was holding streamed into my nose. There was such a contrast between it and the ozone, such a marked difference between the crisp and the ancient, that I felt stretched across time, on fire with being alive and holding such ancient wisdom. It was a perfect moment.

I remember that smell.

Perhaps that moment is why I try to memorize the scents of things that are important to me. I try to memorize the smell of Tristan's hair, the scent of Stephen's chest, the tingle in my nose that is Ashley. And maybe that moment is why, when I get caught up in the depth of loving someone so much that I can physically feel it, the feeling starts in my nose, then moves down to clench in my stomach. Or why when I hurt or am sick, smelling hurts. Any scent is painful. Or why smells I have forgotten, then smell again, can stop me in my tracks. Or why I am led to investigate imaginary scents that only I can smell when we go for walks.

The rain is safety for me. And this light misty rain wraps me up and holds me close. It loves me, if you can understand what that means. And it feels like being home.