Rain Down on Me...

I love the rain.

I love the rain because it washes the world clean.

I love the smell of sidewalks after the rain; that gravely, wet asphalt scent that lets you know the world has been washed away, that tomorrow everything will be fresh.

It's the patter on the sidewalk that does it for me, particularly in a light rain. It is never a bother to have the rain fall lightly on my capped head as I pace through parks and down city streets, walking past people's lawns and smelling the ground beneath turned to mud, that fertile scent.

The gray sky is always lovely as well, dove-tailing perfectly with the crisp air around, the bite of a wet winter day against your skin, soft and yet persistent.

Maybe it's because it reminds me of home--and not the "homes" that I've grown up in, but home in the ancestral sense, the Emerald Isle... it's called that because it rains so much there that it's always green... maybe some ancient memory is conjured every time it rains, some distant part of me remembers the Old Country and longs for it, and is happy to have some piece of it that I can walk around in, connect to, and call my own, even for just a moment....

Even so, it always makes me think of the world being washed clean, that simple and yet profound thing... the necessary and yet so fragile and precious ingredient for life falling from the sky, sometimes like light kisses on the ground, sometimes in a pounding torrent that reminds us just how important it is, almost that IT is in control rather than ourselves. And yet, even in it's rage, it still washes this world clean.

Thunderstorms are magnificent, especially when coupled with rain. Whenever the thunder arrives I leave my window open at night and listen to it... the splatter of rain on the back porch... the brief flashes of light illuminating even the dark beneath the clouds... the crack and explosion when the burst finally arrives in my yard... and the repeat of the process happening all over again, rain punctuated by ionic exclamation points....

It is simply refreshing. No matter what the world has done to you, whether it's beaten you down or broken your heart or taken all your money away, walking in the rain just washes it away--it washes it clean, and you are new for standing out in it. You can splash in the puddles or avoid them, watch the white blossoms on the newly budding trees wash off their temporary homes like warm snowflakes and scatter on the ground, speckling the ground like rose petals on a bed, nature's expression of its love affair with us.

It is love from On High. It is confirmation From Above that we're still being thought of, still being considered down here in the mud that comes from the rain, still being shown that all the filth in this world can be and will be washed away, and that afterward we will all be clean again.

It is simple and profound. It is two elements fused together, a very simple compound of nature, and it arrives in many different ways, but quite often it is as rain.

And I love the rain.