Raindancers For Sunday’s Child

I can trace my earliest memory of rain back to me sitting on the floor before the screen door of the little house in which I grew up. Two roots from a catalpa tree snaked out in the front yard, forming in their above-ground wandering a neat triangle. It had been raining for most of that mostly-forgotten morning and the triangle of roots held a pool of the sky’s water. Drops fell into the little pool, and it seemed to me that each drop created a splash-shape exactly like the little ballerina atop my sister’s music box, narrow legs below a tutu, with tiny arms raised above her head, frozen en pointe for an instant before dissolving downward. Each raindancer appeared and disappeared so quickly that she could only be seen as an afterimage cut into my young retinas.  I sat for a long time that morning, lost in the ballet outside the screen door, trying to keep up with the dancers as they winked in and out of existence for me, just for me, only and ever just for me.

I have no way of knowing for certain, but the authoritative part of me believes this incident occurred on a Sunday, the day of the week on which I was born, the day of the week I have always despised. If ever the hod holding the bricks of melancholy are going to drop the load down on me, it will always be on a Sunday. I have not yet been able to uncover why I hate and fear Sundays; I only know that my relationship with the first day of the week has always been poisoned. But a rainy Sunday is a tolerable Sunday. I rarely pray anymore, but I hope every minute of every day, and every week as Sunday approaches, I hope for rain.

This morning, I let the rain pelt me as I walked, pausing to admire jeweled webs draped on the limelight hydrangeas and strung between tomato plants. I watched a small rabbit taking shelter from it beneath a shelf of leaves at the fence line. And I searched out every puddle, including the bird bath, and watched myself from above as I watched the raindancers lift and spin and drop and die and reappear. They danced for a boy an age ago, and they danced for someone else this morning. The effect was the same. The raindancers are greatly loved. I suspect their ballet master knows this.

~ S.K. Orr