July 1998
When I was young, my mother, sister, and I would stake out on the back porch during rainstorms. I can’t tell you exactly why beyond the the desire to experience the childish notion of playing in the rain, our toes squelching into the damp grass and our t-shirts completely soaked through. We loved slinging mud pies out on the patio, completely staining the concrete with that specific red clay pigment. Our mother would watch from the sidelines with that half-cocked grin of hers, her teeth barely showing before she burst into uproarious laughter.
It was July, and we still lived in that house behind the farms in rural Oklahoma.
This was before we packed up to move into a suburb, before I lost a solid group of friends, before I tripped and fell into the kind of self-loathing only a middle schooler could ever hope to understand. Before him, or her. Before the late nights, before the dull ache of depression, before the constant replays and the conversations gone dull and tepid.
Before the rainstorm of another kind.
And instead of my inevitable recognition of the sound of rain from indoors, I bold-facedly stared up at the wide-open sky, waiting for the onslaught to hit me in a torrential downpour.
Instead of running from storms, I ran into them.
And, maybe, that’s where it all began: in a tiny home, in a tiny town, in the rural plains of Oklahoma. The make believe finger painting on walls, hiding under the tables, simple puzzles and missing puzzle pieces, the tea parties, or collections of cicadas shells and spiders and all manners of bugs. The lesson of fear. The lesson of failure. The hard lefts when others wanted me to turn right.
Instead of fear stilling us, Sydney and I slung red dirt mud pies in our pink and white plastic kitchen, the slap of rain akin to the slap of pie filling against the fragile glass of a baking dish. Our mother sat in her iron throne of a chair against the far wall of the house, watching us and humming a tune, that half-cocked grin of hers still in place. The sunflowers we planted every summer weighed heavy in the rain, the stalks bending under the pressure despite the grand shade of the oak tree in the middle of the yard.
I think about these memories now, in a time of turmoil and chaos, where I’m stuck indoors and watching the rain clouds pass overhead and giving way to a tentative afternoon sunshine. I think of them now that I have the time and peace of mind to weigh them in my hands like treasures, after the distance I put between myself and my struggles with mental health and body image. I think of them when I know I have a ways to go before I make my own home, growing vegetables in a garden I keep dreaming about. I think of them when I look forward into a future I thought uncertain for a long, long time. They make me want to wake up each morning grateful; I want to sit on the patio of my apartment on those same rainy mornings in a city I came to know as home much later.
I know the future, as of now, is still uncertain, especially in a time of global pandemic. Life is no longer the same as it was only a few days or weeks or months ago, and I know eventually the dust will settle. I watch the news with a sense of abject horror, feeling unsettled and anxious with the disruption to a routine in which I have found solace and pleasure. But I think of some of these small moments as a moor in my memories–even if they aren’t accurate, colored with rosy retrospection.
I still love those same sunflowers.
Just as I still love the sound of rain.
And they will bloom again
Sam