Blame it on the Rain

I am seriously tired of this rain. I know that it is good and nourishing for the earth, but really – I need a break. To me, this is more depressing than winter. I can handle a couple of days of rain. Rainy days are good for sleeping in, reading a good book on the couch, and enjoying the comfort of your own home. But after awhile, you just need to get out in the sunshine.

As I was sitting in my funk today – I started thinking more about the rain and I thought about two specific instances when I was in high school that brought a smile to my face.

The first was one year when our church took the annual mission trip to Knoxville. Every year we would work in the inner city of Knoxville for a week and as a reward one night we would go eat at the Apple Barn and enjoy walking on the strip in Gatlinburg. This particular year I remember going to a different restaurant, but we still got to enjoy the strip for a couple of hours after dinner. Well, we had finished all the shopping we wanted to do, so we were all just enjoying walking up and down the strip and it started to rain, and I mean downpour. At first we were all mad because we knew the adults wouldn’t be back at the vans for another 30 minutes, so we were either stuck in a store, or we were stuck on the street. So we decided to make the most of it and we stayed out on the street. We were running up and down the empty streets with our shoes off (I would never do that again!) and splashing in the puddles. We were having so much fun and I will never forget that feeling. There is just something about getting caught in the rain and knowing you have nowhere else to be.

The second memory revolves around slip-n-slides. I love slip-n-slides, but I have not always had the greatest experience with them. Now, since my birthday is in the summer I always had a swimming party, but there were a couple of years that we tried a slip-n-slide party. The problem was that we never really had a great yard for it. One year in particular, we were trying to grow grass in the backyard, but we didn’t have any yet. So the slip-n-slide went down on the dirt, which turned into mud, and there were rocks sticking out of the ground everywhere. So you would get going really fast and then you would hit a rock and come up bruised or bleeding. We still had fun, but it was painful! My best memory of a slip-n-slide was at Centrifuge one year. They set up a huge tarp on the big hill where we were at camp and just started spraying soap and water on it. At the end of the slip-n-slide there was a huge mud hole. It was so big that four or five of us could go down it at once and would end up piled at the bottom in the mud. At one point while we were on the slip-n-slide it started to rain, which most of you know only makes something like that so much better! It is hard to put that experience into words; it just sticks out as one of my favorite moments.

There is something oddly freeing about playing in the rain. Maybe it is the fact that it makes you feel like a kid again and anything that can bring that feeling back brings a sense of freedom along with it.

So maybe the next time it starts raining (maybe tomorrow) I’ll decide to go be a kid again and play in the rain. I’ll look for the biggest puddles to just splash through and maybe I will sit down and make a mud pie! Won’t you join me!!