7. Rain
THE RAIN is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894).  A Child’s Garden of Verses.  1913.

So I memorized something in my childhood, my protests to the contrary. The Seventies were truly a low point in the annals of memorization, and I would have been a poor subject regardless,
but my mother’s love for A Child’s Garden of Verses and Stevenson’s gentle lyrics evidently settled far enough into my brain that I look out the French doors to our dripping arbor and think: “The rain is raining all around…”

It really is. Rumor has it that over the last few days nearly eight inches has fallen in some neighborhoods. B has changed her grumbles over to the inanity of her co-workers’ conversation and her inability to prepare enough reading material to sustain her through swimmerless days working at the pool. Uprooting the tall, deep-rooted ruellia from their self-sown homes is simple rather than a stem-snapping tussle with the usual baked earth of August. All the lights in the house are on, even the ones behind the computer monitor.

I send prayers for my friends in lower Louisiana. They’re not thinking of Stevenson’s rain right now. I wouldn’t be either; theirs has been grim, relentless rain.

But our rain is an easier rain, an unexpected blessing of a rain. The vines on the arbor are adding orange trumpet-blossoms in celebration as I write this.