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Break in the Clouds

by Marian Allen

It rains. That’s what it does. I mean, yeah, we’ve all been to school, duh, we’ve all heard about how it used to rain sometimes and not other times. We’ve all seen pictures of sunshine on fields of corn or whatever right here where we live.

Like that’s a good thing. Like there aren’t places you can take day trips to where the sun shines all the time. Or where you can always count on snow. Or where you have a good chance of having an actual tornado pass over your underground motel, if that’s your idea of a good time.

Here, it’s rain. People come from all over the world to spent a weekend or a week getting drenched outside, like our rain is different from rain zones closer to where they live. Maybe it is different; I don’t know. Local rain is good enough for me.

I make decent money constructing and maintaining drainage and even better money letting tour groups tag along on the job (kickback to the boss, of course, but that’s the cost of doing business). You should see the faces when people from where the sun shines all the time see me uncouple a pipe joint and water gushes out. Sometimes they ask to stick their hands into the flow and feel water just run through their fingers. They always laugh and they always give me big tips.

And now.

Everything is still wet, but the rain has … well, it’s stopped.

I’m glad I don’t have a tour group with me today. It’s bad enough that this is happening when I’m alone. Not that it’s new, exactly. Grandpop used to talk about the time it happened when he was a little boy, although everybody got happy about it back then and hoped it would last.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

I turn on the news. Naturally, it’s all anybody is talking about. Schools are letting classes go outside. They still have to wear their rain gear, of course. Old timers are giving interviews about the last time the rain stopped, although some claim it was only for five minutes and some claim it was forty days and forty nights.

Then it gets worse. The soft dark gray sky splits open and a jagged streak of almost white shows, like a still picture of lightning. Everything looks harsh in the less-filtered light.

I gasp just as somebody on the news chokes out the word for what I’ve seen: “Shadows!”

Somebody on the news is crowing about how beautiful it all is and how it’s something she’ll always remember. Somebody else sounds like he’s speaking for me when he says he hopes the rain isn’t the thing we’ll have to remember. A professor talks about the time in the past when the weather changed, like, every day, and you never knew what to expect. He was excited to think those days might come back, and another professor reminded him of what he called “natural disasters” that happened when people didn’t know exactly what to be ready for from one day to the next.

Then – it’s almost like a miracle – rain sounds in the distance. As it comes closer, the rift in the clouds closes like a wound, the shadows disappear, and the rain returns like long-lost treasure.

I hope I never see anything like that again.

MY PROMPT FOR TODAY: This picture I took in my back yard and the two or so weeks of intermittent rain we’ve had here.