Beautiful old broads go remembering

Dear Ones,

What causes memories to pop into your head?  Unbidden, like apps on a i-pad, they appear without warning tossing you back years or decades to some distant place in your past.  A snatch of a song, a familiar scent or maybe a voice can catapult one down the memory lane. On a recent misty drizzly morning, it was a voice, my mother’s voice that did it.  Oh what a moist day it is, she’d say whenever the rain came down.  No matter if it was a deluge-- to her it was a moist morning.  And it was indeed I thought zipping up my rain jacket and pulling down my hat and letting my mind drift back to those growing up years.

On a rainy afternoon, I’d race in from school, change out of my navy uniform and settle at the kitchen table with a library book until Mother appeared and airily announced she needed carrots or maybe sugar for my sister was bringing home someone for supper. But Mother, I’d complain, it’s pouring outside.  Then she’d lift off her apron and step out on the back porch to proclaim, tis only a moist day. I’d mutter and groan to no avail.  Finally I’d get on my raincoat and rubbers and head three blocks past the church and then turn on Grand River Ave. and there one block up was the A&P. where we shopped.  Along the way I managed to splash through lots of puddles pretending I was Gene Kelly dancing and singing or Elizabeth Taylor racing her horse.  I truly didn’t mind the rainy errand for I knew when I got back home, mother would fuss over me and make me cocoa and spoil me. She always did.

Mother liked the rain probably due to her Irish upbringing but the heat was another story.  How she disliked it.  If the temperature in Detroit hit 80, she considered it a heat wave.  Once the temperature went up, at our house all the shades came down, we had cold cuts for supper and I was instructed to play in the shade on our front porch lest I get sunstroke.

Now the drizzle was turning into a steady downpour putting an end to my walk and I ran for the car.  But first I looked up into the trees where perhaps mother’s ghost was hovering and said, Yes, mom, it is a most day and all this remembering has given me some moist eyes.

            Into each life some rain must fall….that’s why I have a rain barrel