Rain: Yesterday and, Well…Yesterday

In high school English we were given a list of topics and told to write a paragraph about one of them.  I chose rain.  The following day Mrs. Taylor read two of them aloud to illustrate how two people could see one topic in very different ways.  The first paper she read rhapsodized on the loveliness of rain, the way it sounded on a tin roof, etc.  The other was my explanation of the rain cycle: evaporation, clouds, rain – you get the idea.

While doing dishes one evening in the mid 1980s, I wondered how I would write about rain should the topic be assigned again.  I sat down at a typewriter and came up with this.

 

Vicki Wilhelm — September 26, 1978

We met at work. She was from a far away land called Ohio and lonely for her family. I had never left Texas and didn’t understand. We spent months checking each other out, not really getting along. We were so different, so alike. We decided to be friends.

Our husbands got along well. My eight-year-old daughter delighted in my new friend’s baby girl. We spent one magical Christmas eve together, getting high, talking and talking. My little girl was too excited for sleep until the sound of sleigh bells (we all heard them) convinced her that Santa had passed our house because she was still awake.

We watched our children grow. Her baby rolled over by herself and grew her first tooth. My child learned about nouns and verbs, and how to scramble eggs.

But my friend missed that strange, cold land, Ohio, and her baby was without grandparents to note with amazement and adoration, the miracle of baby evolving into child. And so, one rainy, almost spring day, my friend left Texas and me.

My friend called the other day. We talked of husbands, new jobs, children growing, and how hard it is to find a friend.