When I forced myself out the door today, the rain was hesitant, leaving the ground speckled but otherwise dry. I took out my umbrella anyway, raised its worn fabric over my head, and started walking.
Not that I had anywhere to be, or anyone to meet.
I was just walking to walk.
For such a new umbrella, its skeleton always seems so tired and pliant against the wind, but it’s my umbrella, and it has character. I wouldn’t dare switch it out for another. Its dated flower pattern makes me think of dignified grandmothers, proper ladies, and terribly quirky little writers.
That last one is a narrow category, I admit, but I had to fit myself in there somehow.
The rain started to come down harder.
Other, sensible people took this as their cue to scurry off to shelter (under the awnings of convenience stores, in the entryways of strangers’ apartment buildings, below the pillared entrances of currently-empty workplaces—bless summer vacation). I, on the other hand, continued on down the sidewalk, through streams gathering into puddles, and up the miniature flash-flood rivers running downhill over my toes.
That little pleasure is what flat sandals were made for.
If you have nowhere to be, then why shouldn’t you stick your elbow out just a little, let your arm get soaked, let your legs get soaked, let your umbrella be nothing more than a useless symbol that calls out to those looking out from windows,
“It’s raining!“
Rain is the only way I know to remind myself that I am, in fact, a Good Witch, one that doesn’t melt in a summer downpour, that wouldn’t wilt a flower just by glancing at it.
I’m the sort of idiot that gets drenched by a summer rainstorm and grins about it.
It’s nature’s way of knocking sense into us.
“Hydrate!”
“Eat these vegetables I’m watering en masse!”
“You’re just one puny human who’s part of a greater whole!”
That last one seems like a stretch for rain to be yelling at me, but I think it anyway.
A rainstorm turns the world’s colours richer, darker—as if Mother Earth has taken her set of primordial pigments back out and run her brushes back over the landscape. Natural or man-made, everything belongs to her, anything in reach is like to get a loving coat of paint. No discrimination.
Not like us.
Oh, most of us are good children of the Earth. We sure do try.
Hell, I’d like to think I’d give someone the shirt off my back if they really needed it.
But we’re fallible.
If we have brush sets, the pigments we dip them into aren’t nearly as vivid, don’t blend nearly as gentle into their surrounds. There are always crude edges, patchy nothings—we can’t help the state of the tools we have to work with. We lament the lack of our artistry and then are forced to barrel through another piece, unprepared.
I wouldn’t say the rain washed me clean, but being soaked and warm down to the bone brings out a sort of tenderness in me that makes it easier to face my own face.
And I needed that today.
.
August 15, 2019. 五反田・桜田通り.