An ode to rainy days

Rainy days are my favourite kind of day, not those half-hearted drizzles or those short bursts of heavy rain. No, those days of steady rain that kiss the grass with a rhythmic patter. They mean springtime as it edges into summer with days ( sometimes a week or two ) of endless , delightful precipitation. Most people moan and complain but I have nothing but happiness on those rainy day?

I associate them with the first time I had hot chocolate , made sickly sweet and too hot (burning my tongue in the process). It was a weekend away in the Drakensburg when I was six ,when sheets of water fell on the poppies that grew in splashes of scarlet around the houses. It rained that whole weekend but I remember being filled with laughter and happiness.

I recall a rainy day that was the the end of a journey for me, it was the first time I consciously registered that I had to start "growing up". It was the final day of primary school ,where (for the first time ) everyone I had known since I was four would scatter and I would probably never see them again. There wouldn't be anymore early morning walks to school to swim as the sun rose above the jacaranda trees, no more knowing everyone and I felt as the safety net was slowly disappearing under me . For so long, I had always been five minutes away from home, I knew where everything was and this was always an unconscious dependence. Anyway I remember the last time I saw many of those people who used to all I had known. It rained the whole afternoon as we cried and laughed together for the last time.

The last goodbyes where we all cried and for that one last time I walked home together with some of them, the last time we sang together. It poured with rain that entire night, I was inconsolable because I was the only one (that I knew of ) who would be going to a high school in the city (a longish drive that I now regard as normal ) so far away from the familiar small town I knew. Heck, my first day of high school was a scary rainy day where I was thrown into a sea of faces who would later become friends and sisters.

I can never regard a day with rain, as something depressive but as a reminder that everything has its place, that even after a season of dryness there is life triggered by those drops of water that fall from the heavens. That even though change comes with a storm, it washes your slate clean.