Snapshots of a Modest Life

Floating In Puddles

Today was a day to sleep. I woke up this morning-if it was still morning-to the sound of rain battering my window. Sleep, I thought, I should just sleep. So I did for a while longer, although I knew in the back of my brain that I should have been awake and doing homework. After a while the rain stopped and I got up. It was still gloomy outside. That's okay, I thought, gloomy is nice sometimes, maybe it'll rain again later. So I got up and ate a waffle, Eggo, not homemade. The flavor didn't really sink in though, my tongue and the inside of my lip are a little scorched from drinking tea last night. I came down with a tingle in the back of my throat yesterday. So I drank tea, that always helps.

I spent the rainy day watching the telly and thinking about how I should be reading Frankenstein, and how perfect a day it is to be reading a Gothic horror novel. A while later I found myself in my bed, gazing at the work of an 18-year-old Mary Shelley, wondering if I'll ever be published. It was raining again. The heavy drops battered my window, and I fell asleep again.

I dreamed something. I don't remember what. My suitemates voices floated in and out of my consciousness, but I never woke up from my dream. I wasn't happy, that's all I know. Restless, like I had something to do. Reality seeps into dreams sometimes. I wish it wouldn't.

I woke up a while later, it was around six o'clock I think. Something hard was hitting my window. That's odd, I thought. So I listened again, and there was the hard thing hitting my window again. I popped out of bed and gazed through the wet glass at the rain and the hail bouncing off the picnic table on the patio. I ran to the front door, flung it open, and gazed at the ice falling from the sky. There was more rain than hail, and it wasn't even that large--at most the size of an average grape--but I watched just the same, a few of the pebbles hitting my bare shins as I stood in the open doorway. The rain was really coming down, so much that the small steps across the street had become an impressive waterfall. I went around to all the doors to see what each view had to offer. I saw the hail bouncing off the windshield and roof of my car. I watched it float in the massive puddle outside the back door.

Before long it stopped hailing, but the rain kept coming, so I sat at my desk and watched it. I like rainy days. When I was little I always liked when it rained hard. There was a hemlock tree in my yard that always had a deep puddle under its low branches when it rained hard. When the rain stopped and my parents let us out, my brothers and I would make paper boats and float them in the puddle. We would push them with long sticks, stepping through the puddle in our big rubber boots. We would race them until they got waterlogged and wouldn't stay upright anymore. We tried racing paper boats in the gutters with the neighbor kids on rainy summer afternoons when we moved to Orlando. It wasn't the same though.

I tried to make a paper boat the other day. I couldn't remember how.