I am Not a Stranger to the Rain

I think you should look up the lyrics to that song.

So I realized today that I've missed the rain. Granted, I realized it while in a car. I certainly did not appreciate it when I was walking around looking for busses earlier in the day, and I'm glad it started raining just as the cross country season ended because usually we have a lot of rainy workouts and those are no fun. In any case, I was coming home and it was raining very hard and there were leaves all over the ground and it was windy and there were umbrellas and something on the radio resembled Love Songs with Delilah and life was good. If you asked me in May what my favorite time of year was, I'd tell you that I love May, that it's getting back to being sunny and the school year is wrapping up and friends go out and play frisbee all the time and we spend time in the sun together and it's just fantastic. In July I'd tell you it was July, in September I'd tell you the beginning of fall, and now I'll say that November and December are my favorite. I'm always cold, but one of the best feelings in the world is being inside when it's cold outside, like running in the rain and the coming in and getting dry and sitting by a warm fire eating... any of the various random foods my family attempts to cook on a fire... and hearing/seeing the rain and the wind and the cold outside and knowing you're safe from it. Also, this time of year has a very distinct smell- a sort of cinnamon-nutmeg-allspice mixture with pumpkin that spreads to include clove and apple as the season progresses. It's the idea of walking outside and smelling pine and smoke from fireplaces, of those nice days when it's windy and cold but not yet and the last leaves from autumn are still on the ground but most of the trees are bare, an idea that doesn't include snow because we are in Seattle, but that does include the increasing excitement that there's that tiny chance of snow, that just maybe sometime this season we'll wake up and look out the window before we even get out of bed and the pink sunrise will be reflected off of a thin layer of white on the ground. For me, this is seeing my neighbor's skylights coated in snow and then walking down to the kitchen only to realize our own skylights are also coated. It's seeing my younger brother and sister run outside to make snowmen and snow angels out of the one or two inches we have, and my own insistence that they at least try to leave a little patch untouched somewhere- on the swingset, by the bare maple tree, in front of the shed... not that it really makes a difference but just so that I can be content in my few square feet of heaven. Of course this doesn't happen every year and it's a memory that won't come again because my little brother lives in Oregon now, but the excitement of it is something that I associate with December much more than with January through March, and the tiny hope for snow contributes to the holiday feeling.

When I get really excited about things, I write long ranty sentences. This is also true when I get angry. They make sense (I think), but they're not gramatically correct/poetic/anything else that you would actually publish. I need to figure out how to transfer that kind of excitement into writing.