Rain

Besides watering our crops in some areas and causing great destruction by floods in others, rain offers much more. It might be said that one has not truly slept until he has done so under a tin roof during a steady autumn shower. Of course, the pleasure of that comes just before one sleeps, for he doesn’t know about it while he sleeps. So it may be said, a fine continuous drizzle helps one go to sleep. Recordings of rain are on the market, intended to help listeners do just that very thing. But in the old days, just as one was falling under the influence of a recording, cassette players, turning themselves off with a loud click, undid the good work. Today the CD player turns itself off in silence but who has one beside his bed?

On the other hand, rain helps to awaken the mind if one is creative. Perhaps artists don’t opt to paint pictures while it is raining, unless they have a well-lighted studio to dispel outside gloom. Perhaps composers don’t create great sonatas in damp weather either. But with writers rain can be a beacon of light itself, for the brain stirs with the change in weather, as if that means a change in the story’s direction. I recall in my early college days, getting up before dawn for the ten or so miles’ bus travel across town, while the rest of the family slept. Many southern autumn mornings were rainy, causing me to linger at a window, looking out—feeding my writing brain—rather than feeding my body. I scorned bright light in the kitchen as I gave in to preparing my breakfast and eating it in semi-darkness.

Looking out a window in the rainy dawn had nothing to do with meteorology, but only with writing. It was the perfect moment to write—if one could write in the dark—and I did make a note or two. I mentally wrote all the way to the bus line. Then this monster bus intruded into my thought, wiping away all I had “written” during the past hour. My companion on the bus was the reflection of the person who sat in front of me in the window beside him, for if I looked elsewhere, I might be dragged into conversation and that was a killer to a would-be writer during a dark rainy morning in the south.

♥