It is pouring rain. It has rained all day, a relentless jungle rain, that is flooding my basement, making me pull back from the edges of the porch, and changing my plans — most grievously my early-morning plans. I was looking forward to walking MacKenzie, my perpetual toddler, because I am needy. I am mourning the loss of my eldest, and the impending loss of my middle child to college. They are happy and fulfilled and doing what I want them to do. I am bereft.
So I planned to pull on my jeans first thing, which is MacKenzie’s signal that the weekend has arrived, and drive with her to the wooded park and walk and walk for an hour. Instead, I am on Venus, in Bradbury’s “The Long Rain,” where four astronauts have crash-landed and search in vain for the Sun Dome. The rain drives them mad. Only one survives (or does he, really?) and reaches the Sun Dome, with its warmth, its blessed dryness and its toast.
I made myself two slices of toast and sat on the front porch and ate them. I thought about Bradbury’s brilliant short story. I was finally dry after having run in and out of the car and four stores, helping my middle child shop for college. We were all drenched. Being wet, and shopping in an air-conditioned store is miserable.
Eldest child had packed herself. Middle is new at this, it’s his first time leaving that doesn’t involve camping, and he needed things like clothes hangers and a desk lamp, a stapler and staples. He needed a lap top, and I made that major purchase looking like an astronaut that had just crash-landed in Best Buy.
I am dry now, and still sad. So I will post some photographs that my eldest child took with her 20th-birthday present: a digital camera. Yes, it is a marvelous tool. But I credit the composition of the photos and the talent for snapping the shutter at just the right moment to her artistic eye. She sees the beauty in my garden that I see but cannot describe adequately.
She makes a swallowtail butterfly look like it was touched by the hand of God — which, of course, it was. Look at how beautiful my world is, rain or no:
Strength and color and tenderness.
A face turned to the sunshine.
A breathless pause before the blossom opens.
Colors that make the breath catch in your throat.
I miss the light of my child. Soon, I will be missing the presence of two. And one child remains, trembling when she imagines the full force of my parental focus. She doesn’t realize that mothers often parent from afar, from just knowing a child sleeps within, that they are almost within reach, and that is enough. She has nothing to fear from me. I carry the Sun Dome that is my children with me always.
WORDS FROM OTHERS
“The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”
–Ray Bradbury, “The Long Rain”
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