A friend and I stand on the balcony of our apartment building when the rain’s rhythm on our windows becomes impossible to ignore. Sometimes it catches us when we’re walking home, and we stay in it until our jeans are soaked through and the socks under our boots are threatening to dampen. We are often wearing similar clothing, we are of a similar height, our faces resemble one another, and we look out over the street—twin specters in the rain.
There is the first drop, always, which lands like an unexpected kiss to the nape of the neck. The next drops are much the same, though expected now, stippling over shirts and pants. A sheen forms on exposed skin. Hair fuses to the forehead. Then, the sound. A rhythm in it, whether the fall is heavy or light, whether it comes on in a flash or falls down the whole day—something so essential and relentless that the mind slows to meet it.
There was never a first rain. Well, surely there must have been, but it seems like it was always happening. Most of us are too young to remember when exactly we comprehended these basic elements: rain, snow, hail, mist, sleet, fog. When I meet them now, I sense I am feeling a shade of that first encounter. A suspension in love of looking, a desire to reach out and touch.
When I was a kid, I never understood why my father seemed to be pulled, magnetized, to the back porch during storms. He would stand for as long as the weather lasted, eyes fixed on the yard, watching the burr oak flail on currents of wind. He watched it with greater intensity than he brought to MeTV reruns of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I have a memory, questionably true, of him forgetting to turn the oven off because he was so transfixed by the rain.
In those days there were more interesting things to me. I spent most of my time doodling in the margins of notebooks and trying to pickpocket my mother’s Blackberry so I could play Snake. The rain came every few days. It marked, more than anything, inconvenience—strong enough to fell a power line, or slick enough to send a shiver through car’s backmost tires, or heavy enough to keep the teachers from letting us go outside.
Nowadays, I’m more inclined to join my father. I can watch the precipitation for hours on end, hope it never stops, even if it floods my mom’s herb garden or seeps down the basement walls.
Weather is common. An event or a non-event. For many years, between eleven and fourteen, I had my charts, my water cycles. Liquid evaporates from groundwater, runoff, oceans, lakes, streams, fills clouds which, when heavy, release their contents. I knew how it all worked, earned my ninety-four in environmental science, went home and ignored the drum on my roof. But now I’ve forgotten all that. The world is miraculous again.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
