Rain

She listened to the rain beat on the wooden roof of her new home, and she remembers.

She remembered when she was eight and her family had just moved from Eastern Washington to Western Washington. It was raining and she was dancing in it. She could hear her Mother telling her new step-father to not worry about calling the children in. They weren’t used to the rain.

She was seventeen and they were running from his car to her front door. The sky poured rain, each drop a needle through her thin shawl. Their breathe steaming between them as they laughed and shook out the useless newspaper they had tried to use for cover.

Married at twenty-five a light mist started to fall at the reception and the bride and groom danced in it. She remembers how the droplets stuck in hair and veil, lining everything in a thousand diamonds. She remembers looking through her dew laden lashes as he bent down to kiss her, man to wife.

Forty-two, she can still hear the screech of tires on wet road and feel the impact of the crash the claimed her son.

She was sixty-seven when she saw a desert bloom for the first time. Standing unafraid as the storm raged itself out. The rain transforming seeds that had waited years decades even for one event to transform them into flowers.

At a tired ninety-eight she wouldn’t listen to her granddaughter who told her to come inside before she caught her death of a cold.

***

The rain patters softly on a multitude of black umbrellas, darkening the freshly turned earth.
“She always loved the rain”