Summer Rain

Summer rain taps at my window
West wind soft as a sweet dream
My love warm as the sunshine
Sittin' here by me, she's here by me


It was 1967.  I was 17.  (When you are born in 1950, you always know how old you were in any given year.)  Johnny Rivers crooned from the radio or the juke box and we all swooned to this song.  It can still wring out my heart.


Today was one of those "mix of sun and clouds" days.  I would go out to the garden when the sun was out, then seek inside when the cloud cover chilled the air.  It was like that all day.  And then, late afternoon, the wind whipped up, the sky darkened, and there was a brief but serious rain.


Minutes later, the sun was out again.  It was then that I had to run an errand, so I headed down our back road.  When I got to the county road, the steam rising up from the asphalt was thick and mysterious.  And I was transported.


Who knows why we remember what we remember?  Maybe I was nine or ten that late May afternoon when the sky opened up and then, just as suddenly, relented.  I was dressed in my Sunday best, ready (but nervous!) for my piano recital at a nearby church hall.  In my memory's eye, I watch myself walk down the street to my aunt's house.  I no longer remember why, but that's not important.  The memory lives not because of any importance to the event, but because the atmosphere spoke to me that day.  Perhaps it was my first awareness that the earth could be cleansed, that after a weather event, there is calm and beauty and mystery.  I have carried this memory with me for 55 years.  It must mean something.


We sailed into the sunset
Drifted home, caught by a gulf stream
Never gave a thought for tomorrow
Just let tomorrow be, now, let tomorrow be


And now it's tomorrow.  Fifty-five years later, and a summer rain can still evoke something from me.  I can't define it; I can't articulate it.  But I can fall in love with it all over again.


Again and again.