Ezekiel 16:6-8 (Young's Literal Translation)
6 And I do pass over by thee, And I see thee trodden down in thy blood, And I say to thee in thy blood, Live, And I say to thee in thy blood, Live.
7 A myriad -- as the shoot of the field I have made thee, And thou art multiplied, and art great, And comest in with an excellent adornment, Breasts have been formed, and thy hair hath grown -- And thou, naked and bare!
8 And I pass over by thee, and I see thee, And lo, thy time [is] a time of loves, And I spread My skirt over thee, And I cover thy nakedness, And I swear to thee, and come in to a covenant with thee, An affirmation of the Lord Jehovah, And thou dost become Mine.
I would do almost anything to see rain. A three-day soaker over a three-day weekend, the kind where you stay in bed and watch movies and eat popcorn and only stop to make more tea, go to the bathroom, or make out…that’s the kind of rain I mean. I’m to the point of painting my mother-naked body with poster paint, run out in the backyard and dance around for a couple of minutes. It’s dryer here than it’s been since the Nineteen Twenties. The river I watched climb out of her banks in front of my twenty-year-old eyes now lays sluggish and shriveled well beneath the stairs I once used with such ease on hot springtime and long summertime days a decade ago.
Everything inside of me seems to be crying for rain, echoing the wilting green screams of the lawns and gardens all around town, county, region, state. I see the popup thunderheads, so proud in the afternoons, irony gray and tinged with blue against the movie screen of memory. But what I really see is heat mirages billowing up on the asphalt that lines 410, the way the sky looks so hot and high that it’s just all white, no blue, nothing remotely like a cloud to even tease you with the promise of a little shade.
I remember the time my little brother saw rain for the first time. He was almost two. We were at my grandmother’s house, being hooligans. Clouds gathered, thunder began to rumble, and those precious drops began to color up the sidewalk. I started stripping off my clothes, running for my bathing suit, and threw open the door the minute I was decent, making a bee-line to the browning lawn to dance like a very small savage doing a spastic almost-six-year-old interpretation of a rain dance. My little brother walked onto the porch, holding my mother’s hand, looked up with his impossibly blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, and wanted to know what was falling from the sky.
It’s so dry…people who are caught using sprinkler systems more than once every two weeks are getting huge tickets. Only hand-watering is allowed every day. People are even doing laundry at Laundromats to save on their water bills, and to reduce water waste. My toilet won’t stop leaking, and that makes me feel like a horrible person, so I’m replacing the guts tomorrow. Should be an interesting trip to Home Depot…I’m a little nervous, truth be told.
But what I really want is rain…the kind that comes on slow and steady, making the dirt smell green, rinsing the dust and grit away. I really should wash my car, but I can’t bear to think about using all that water. But the car really does look kind of nasty.
I’m sitting here listening to bluegrass music, turned up loud. Bluegrass sounds so cool, clinging, refreshing to me, even the sad songs. It reminds me of the smell of rain in the woods…the way it smells like resin, and how you can almost hear the leaves getting fat and sated with the moisture. I remember swimming neck-deep in the Little Blanco River during a rainstorm in October...it was still warm enough to swim. I love swimming in the rain…not in lightening, but in the rain. It’s such an incredible sensation. I remember being neck-deep, big fat drops making splashes on the water and throwing up a fine mist, almost like it was raining up, and seeing the leaves in the hills just starting to get yellow and orange, and in the back of my head hearing “Yonder Stands Little Maggie”, with Ralph Stanley belting his guts out.
I want it to rain. I want to sit in my kitchen and eat a bowl of grits and drink a pot of coffee and listen to the rain smack against the metal roof of the carport. I want to run out the backdoor, thank God for privacy fences, shuck my clothes and take an outside shower, rinse my hair in the rain, and laugh like a small child, smelling my rosemary and lavender giving off their perfume in their own thanksgiving to God. There will be water if God wills it…I read that somewhere, once in a great story about knights and towers and a quest. I know there will be water if God wills it…I hope God wills it.
Shit has been weird for the last couple of weeks. The heat is getting to people, and it’s hanging a kind of lethargy over everyone, or it seems to have done so with me, at least. All I can think of is how hot it is outside. Seriously. Weird things have been afoot lately, they just seem to be made even more weird and sort of extra shitty because it’s so effing hot. I’m not kidding. The news did a whole play-ground experiment and tested the equipment with an infrared thermometer during one hot afternoon. The effing pavement was 140 degrees…that’s the temperature at which you poach an egg. It’s got to rain, or people are going to start going a little nutty, I think. It’s like some kind of seasonal disaffective disorder. I feel like I'm having to actively restrain myself from punching people in the face, just on general principle because it's just too damn hot. I wish I were kidding. I'm so not.
I keep looking for rings around the moon, to see if the sage bushes on the esplanade down my street are starting to pink up, to see if people in slightly shady neighborhoods are hanging dead snakes on their back fences, yet. I seriously have been waking up and going to sleep praying for rain.
Mercy…
Also, please pray for Jane.
mil besos,
rmg
