When I was a kid we used to have summer thunderstorms all the time… maybe it’s the distortion of remembered childhood but it seemed like they rolled in every other afternoon and always right on 3pm just as school was letting out. I lived two streets away from my school and would walk to and from school every day with my sisters and Catherine – an older kid from across the street who liked to lord it over us with her ‘I’m the boss of you’ attitude… I remember she used to yank on the back of the pixie collars of our school uniforms effectively choking us if we walked too far ahead of her and I recall disliking her a lot. In a rather immature and uncharitable manner, I remember being secretly pleased once when she was injured while walking a large german shepherd named Prince on a lead that had gotten away from her and dragged her on the road for several metres. She lost a lot of skin off her elbows and knees and I felt she’d got her comeuppance for being such a bossy know-it-all bitch all the time…. but I digress.
BigSal, Borys and LittleTish (c. 1981)
I always loved the afternoon storms. I would stare out the windows in last period as the clouds darkened and wait to hear the first fat raindrops hitting the hot concrete in the quad. We’d stand under the awnings for a few minutes after we got out of class to see if it was going to let up a bit and then inevitably decide to make a run for it. We’d all be running hell for leather to get home and that nasty little bint Catherine would race on ahead without waiting for us to catch up.
I love the feeling of freedom I always had from running home from school in the rain. To get home we had to pass through a large empty oval park with hardly any trees which would turn into a shallow lake a couple of inches deep during every big storm before the water drained away (yes… slight lightning hazard there). Sometimes I used to stop in the park and tilt my head back… just standing there enjoying the feel of the raindrops falling on my face. Once we were already soaked we knew we were in for a half hearted scolding from my Mum (usually about getting our leather school shoes all ruined) so sometimes we’d just give up and run amok kicking water at each other in the park and floating leaves or paddlepop sticks down the gutters. When I was a teenager I used to force my Mum, my little sister or my cousin Rochelle who used to live with us to come out and go walking in the pouring rain with me.
Now as an adult I hate being caught in the rain – your shoes get ruined, you have to try and cover your (usually stupidly expensive) handbag and then there’s the dripping mess to clean up in the entry hall when you get in the door…. unless of course I go out to get drenched deliberately 🙂 If I’ve nowhere I need to be and nothing I need to do… I still like to grab an old shirt and go stand out in the pouring rain getting soaked to the bone or take a walk around the streets. I feel like less of a lunatic if I drag the Small Child out with me (though he doesn’t usually want to come out and get wet) and we’ll jump in puddles and kick water at each other for a while before coming inside and getting warmed up.
The day of my Dad’s funeral was the culmination of a particularly stressful week and I remember being in the backyard at my parent’s home and watching the clouds gathering at around 3pm and it definitely looked like it was going to pour any minute. At the first sign of rain about 80 people tried to cram into the downstairs of the house to avoid getting wet taking drinks and food tables etc all undercover. I found myself standing under the patio staring out at the backyard as the rain pelting down. After several minutes watching the rain… I walked out into the backyard and just stood there with my face to the sky. My cousin Rochelle came out too and gave me a hug and we stood there having a bit of a cry until we were saturated. I rounded up the Small Child and some of his cousins and got them playing tag in the rain laughing and just enjoying the feeling of being alive while the other ‘adults’ looked on from inside the house.
Running around in the pouring rain with the kids that afternoon and laughing as though we hadn’t a care in the world seemed to have a truly cleansing and cathartic effect. I swear I went home that evening feeling like a massive weight had been lifted. Getting soaked in the pouring rain still evokes the same carefree feelings it did when I was a kid… and after the draining day I had yesterday I found myself looking out my window this afternoon wishing the sky would darken and send me a therapeutic thunderstorm.
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