Rain

Yesterday I made myself get out of bed, forced myself to have breakfast, and faced a day I hate facing every year. I knew I would work my way through the day and let the tears take over after everyone was tucked snugly in bed.

This year it felt different, worse. Perhaps because you expect it to hurt on the first year or fifth year or the tenth year, and not the seventh year. Perhaps because of the profound grief I have been touched by in the last several months.

So I busied myself. The carpet of the classroom I'm moving into for next year is beyond filthy. Our maintenance staff will clean it, but I wanted it "my" clean. My mother-in-law gave us a carpet shampooer for Christmas a few years ago (yeah, read that one over a few times), and J.R. thought it might be a good idea to shampoo the carpet.

I nabbed a sitter and figured cleaning would be exactly the therapy I needed.

I was wrong. I forget sometimes that where I work is filled with memories of my father. We worked for the same school district. I went back to that school to work a week after my world collapsed. I work with people who want to talk about their memories of him, no matter how much I don't want to. I stood outside the classroom two doors down from my own when I got the call that my grandmother, my father's mother, had died--only eight months after his death and largely because after his death she chose to quit living.

Yesterday, I played the music extra loud. And I tried to think of anything else, but I couldn't. His memory was pervasive. I cleaned and cried.

In order to fill up the carpet shampooer, I had to walk about 100 yards to the only faucet left on that side of campus that hadn't been shut off for the summer. On the first three walks back to my classroom, I watched the clouds rolling in.

Of course, I thought to myself, it's going to rain when I have to drag myself across campus every 15 minutes for water. Figures.


On my 17th birthday, my parents asked me what I wanted. I couldn't think of anything. And so I asked my dad to give me rain.

I grew up in the desert. The dry, windy heat wears on me. I have never been happier than when I lived in England where I could count on regular damp and gloom.

I jokingly asked my father to make it rain on my 17th birthday.

And it did. All day it rained in pleasant spurts, letting it soak into us between the showers. The air smelled dirt-sweet and the sky hung low and dark.

It became a joke for the rest of his life. My dad could do anything because he could make it rain.


On my fourth trip for water to fill the shampooer, the rain began. I stepped out of my classroom into a cocoon of clouds and dirt-sweet air, and I remembered.

I let the rain fall on me, took my time walking to the faucet and back, left the door open so the air could fill my classroom.

And I walked with a smile for the rest of the day, as it continued to rain on and off, letting it soak into me between showers, laughing to myself at the shared joy of an inside joke.

Because it was raining. And I know why.