the seasons here

Yes, I miss fall. I look at friends' photos on Facebook, and I can almost smell those piles of brown and orange leaves. I can almost feel them crunching underfoot. I remember the times we would ask our neighbors if we could rake all their leaves and bring them over to our own backyard to play with. Now, as the parent, I realize how much patience Mom had with us. But how I loved making a huge bed out of leaves, covering it with an old sheet carefully tucked in around the edges. I took some blissful naps on those leaf-beds, covered with a blanket to protect against the Autumn chill.

But I can't take for granted the seasons I get to experience now. So very different from Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter! Here, we have dry season and rainy season. Rainy season, at the moment. There's often a sudden cool wind that gives us a minute's warning that a torrential downpour is on its way toward us. More days than not, I'll feel that breeze rush into the house, and I will drop whatever else I'm doing to run outside and frantically rip clothes off the line before my sun-dried clothes get drenched with tropical rain.

I love standing at the window or on the step waiting for the rain to arrive. You can hear the thunderous sound of its approach on tin roofs; then, with a deafening roar, it arrives.

If you are standing outside when it comes, you might as well be standing under a waterfall. The other day, while this neighborhood was in the midst of a days-long city-water outage, a friend told me she had considered going outside and just shampooing up her hair and taking a rain-shower. Indeed, when the rain arrives, people everywhere are gratefully putting out buckets to catch the precious torrents.

As far as seasonal fun, you should hear the boys' cries of glee when the rain hits. If I let them run outside, they will doubtless return drenched, mud-covered and totally content at the end of the rain. There was that one time John ran out in a white t-shirt...a t-shirt that will never be white again, no matter how much bleach is used on it. So these little guys are making their own youthful memories, like my happy autumn-leaves memories from childhood...even if they are memories in different place, and in a different kind of season.

After the rains, it is calm, and the sky is beautiful and clear again. Time to go hang the laundry back out on the line.