Enjoy the Rain

Enjoy the Rain

Drip...drip...drip.

I narrowed my sleepy eyes as I brought the straw of my glass to my lips and sucked up more of the cold, mocha iced coffee. Usually, the sound of the rain was the most intoxicating sound I could dream of, especially since the roof of my old singlewide trailer was tin. However, the melody of the rain seems to have a different affect when it can be heard bouncing off a linoleum floor. Being a young, unskilled, college student, I solved the issue the only way I knew how, by sprawling out every cooking pan I owned sporadically across the floor and hoping the rain would not persist.

My chest bellowed outwards in an exasperated sigh as I sat my glass onto a wooden coaster and looked down to the ground. Jake, the young Siberian Husky that was my companion for the passed year, looked up at me with his bright blue eyes and met my sigh with a snort of his own. I attempted to appease his restlessness with a firm pat on the head. It was easy to know what he wanted. It was raining with the ferocity that it may never rain again, he loved the rain, and he wanted to go outside and play in it; and the only thing he loved more than creating mud outside in the rain was bringing it inside to display across my kitchen floor. There was a dog door that granted Jake access to the outside, and while rain was falling, this door remained closed.

Looking up from the blue eyes watching me from the floor, I refocused back across my kitchen table, through the door-less frame leading into the laundry room. I loved the rain too, I just preferred that it stayed outside. Now, here I am, sitting at my kitchen table sipping on coffee and listening to the different melodies the rain could make as it drips into different sized pots and pans. I pulled out my cellphone, holding my right thumb briefly over the fingerprint scanner and went into my contacts as soon as the home screen appeared. Who else was a girl to call regarding home repair issues other than her father? Who else would a girl call if her father had over forty years of carpentry experience?

"Hell-no, I mean, hell-o?" My father's loud, familiar voice rang on the receiving end of the call with the same greeting that I have heard my entire life.

"Dad" I muttered, trying to mask the sound of frustration in my voice, "The roof is leaking again."

"Again," he repeated the word exaggeratedly, "Alrighty, well, don't drown and I'll come look at it tomorrow when it dries up."

There was no way to resolve the issue while the rain still poured down, and it would persist all throughout the day. I sat at the kitchen table for another half-hour while I finished my ritual of coffee drinking, scrolling through Facebook, and mentally preparing for the day ahead. If the weather were any premonition for the day, then I should have just stayed in bed and let my husband make his own lunch and see himself off to work, as I did every weekday morning.

----

Sunshine came in through every window of the small singlewide trailer that had its curtains pulled to the side. I sat again at my bar-height kitchen table, sipping on cold mocha iced coffee and mindlessly scrolling through Facebook on my smartphone. It was several days after I made the dreaded phone call to tell my father that his third attempt at fixing the leaks in the roof failed. Everything atop the trailer had plenty of time to dry by now. I looked back into the laundry room from the table, haunted by the phantom water droplets that I could imagine still falling from the ceiling.

Often, I wondered if it was just as disheartening for my father as it was for me to see such a beautiful roof leak. It is hard on a person after they have worked so hard to create something, only to watch it slowly get destroyed. The entire laundry room was our creation. Six grueling weeks of building the addition to the trailer from the ground up, only to watch nature slowly destroy it from the roof down. It was a mystery, one that even forty years of carpentry experience had difficulty solving. There was a firm knock at the front door, one that was all too familiar. I made my way from the kitchen, across the living room where I unlocked and opened the front door.

"I'm 'bout gettin' damn tired of hearin' from you!" the man bellowed, his voice loud as it always was, and he laughed as he walked in through the front door and patted me heavily on the back, then to the impatient dog attempting to greet him, "Hello, Jake!" He gifted Jake his usual pat on the head as the husky had obvious difficulties containing his excitement in typical dog fashion.

"Well, I'm 'bout gettin' tired of callin' you!" I met his sarcasm with my own, this was simply the back and forth relationship we shared. My husband often joked that, if it were not for my father's and my personality it would be difficult to tell I descended from him.

"You got more leaks? Show me where."

We walked through the small trailer into the kitchen, then through the side doorway that used to house the backdoor of the trailer, into the laundry room addition.

"Here" I pointed out areas of the roof, now having to do best guesses to where the leaks where, because all the sheetrock was now dry, and the water damage barely noticeable, "and here, and here."

It almost sounded as if the air had been let out of my father like a balloon as he let out a long whistle while he looked around the ceiling, "Damn, kid. Why ain't you patched up this roof better than that?" he tried to give me a tough time, jokingly, knowing that any work I had done on the roof he had accompanied me for. He often expected me to be able to accomplish more than what my knowledge allowed, I suppose it was his way of challenging me.

"Don't look at me, I ain't the handyman."

"Well hell, apparently I ain't either!" he shrugged, "Oh well, let's see what we can do."

Being afraid of heights, I did not accompany him onto the roof although he said 'we', he must have had a rat in his pocket. I sat at the kitchen table, listening to the footsteps on the roof of the trailer, and worked on reading research for an upcoming paper for my class. Jake ran around in the fenced back yard, simply excited to be outside and alive; sometimes I wished I could have his enthusiasm for most things, especially when having to deal with leaking roofs.

There is a lot we can learn from dogs.

After an hour of listening to the rooftop footsteps, I hear the back door open.

"Alright, kid, that's it for now." My father took a handkerchief from his back pocket, removed his Tennessee baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead and face, expelling his breath heavily, "It's hot as hell on that roof!"

"Yeah, you don't say!" I laughed, "Do you think you fixed it this time?"

"Hell, who knows!" he shrugged as he opened my refrigerator, hoping to make himself at home and grab a beverage, "Where's the beer?!"

"You know we don't buy beer as much as you do! There is sweet tea in there if you're thirsty." I knew he would turn it down, although it was only 10 o'clock in the morning, it was never too early for a cold beer.

He crinkled his nose, making the whiskers above his lips stick out, "No, no, I don't want no tea, Sweetie, I'm fine." He feigned as if he was not actually thirsty, and simply looking through the fridge. I knew he would dip into his cooler as soon as he went back outside to his truck.

I walked my father back to the front door, as if he couldn't find it on his own.

"Well, if it leaks again, the only thing we can do is just...try again!" he laughed as he stepped out of the front door, "If you need me, I'll call you." He ended most of his work-reated visits with this joke.

I hugged him and thanked him, as I always did when he fixed something around the house. Usually, this would not be a repeated process for issues I would be having, except for that damn roof.

----

Several hours passed. I sat in my bedroom, just off the kitchen separated by a short hallway with the pantry; pretending to be engrossed with the stock market research I had been reading for a finance course and now sipping on cold sweet tea with lemon, instead of my usual iced coffees. It was nearly 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

Suddenly from nowhere, a sound erupted. Almost as if a dump truck in the sky were releasing a load of pebble onto the trailer. Rain was an unmistakable sound when hitting a tin roof, it was enough to intoxicate, until one realizes there was the chance of it raining inside as well. I jumped up and ran into the laundry room. I was unable to beat Jake to the back door, to put the door lock onto the pet door before he could make his way outside. There was a race between the two of us each time it rained. It was too late, and the husky was nothing but a blur of black and white from one side of the back yard to the other, kicking up mud as he went. The rain made him appear thinner and thinner as it settled into his thick coat.

"Shoot." I muttered to myself as I looked at Jake through the laundry room window, "No point in bringing him in now I guess until he's done."

I looked out that window for a long while, watching Jake run and be carefree in the warm summer rainstorm. The trees were beginning to sway more and more as the wind picked up; as it did it carried the sweet smell of fresh cut grass from several days before. A familiar sound began to ring out.

Drip...drip...drip.

I turned slowly from watching Jake in the window. Over my left side, close to the doorway of the laundry room, the first contender has already emerged. The rain outside came down with such violent ferocity, it was soon adapted back into the laundry room, and dripped with just as great a ferocity.

"No, no, no, no, no" I repeated as I ran over to the wet spots in the floor and stared up at the ceiling.

The areas of the ceiling that I had previously pointed out to be fixed were not currently leaking. However, new, unseen patches of water had made their way into the mix. Through my own inexperience as a carpenter, I could only imagine that whatever my father had done up there only redirected the waterflow. I let out a noise of frustration, somewhere between a growl and a yell.

Suddenly, a black and white blur sped by the window once again. It was still Jake, outside, in the rain; he loved the rain, and he loved to play in it. He appeared to be such a smaller dog now, completely soaked by the rain. My eyes made trails between Jake running outside, and the rain running inside. It was then I remembered, I loved the rain too, and I ran out the back door too quickly to bother closing it.

It felt as though I was taking a warm shower, and soon I was completely drenched. I lifted my hands up into the air as if to catch the drops falling from the sky. Jake took this as initiation to play; which I happily took as I crouched down and jumped from the porch towards him. He bolted like lightening, left and then right, trying to fake me out. It was truly amazing what we can learn from dogs, like how to enjoy the rain.