Precipitation!

Rain. Such a simple word for something that feels like so much more. It rains, it pours, it drizzles, it sprinkles, it stops, and sputters into life again. It hates your umbrella. It loves the seemingly interminable time it takes to prop up that flimsy plastic barrier. It lives, it schemes, it waits and it knows when you will venture out of the shade.

Puddles form on the sidewalk, streams flow joyously into a drain. If you stare long enough, you feel like a giant looking down on a mighty river, a river you can cross with one step. You’re endlessly making a decision: to step in a puddle or to dance around it. To step in and feel the instant shiver of cold water run under your feet, or to step around and look like a hopping lunatic to those behind you. You constantly try to hold your umbrella just right so no pesky, errant raindrops make it down your back. All you see are shuffling feet; the bobbing, colored edge of your umbrella forms a veil. The wind is never on your side.

Some people feel the rain, others just get wet. But how do you feel the rain? Is it feeling how the water works its way into the ridges on your skin? Is it catching a drop on your finger, and watching it evaporate back to where it came from? Is it feeling the squelch of mud between your toes and craving for a puddle to wash it away in? Or is it how you feel IN the rain? Feel happy, calm, pensive, foolish, crabby? Feel protected inside the cocoon of your umbrella; feel relieved that the people around you are precluded from conversation or eye contact; feel envious of those you see brave enough to walk without a shade; feel wistful, knowing that you will scurry back to work, and the damp will dry, and you will be left stealing glances through the window?

You hurry to get to where you’re going. But not too much: just one more puddle, one more splash, one more cold rush.