Rain

It’s raining outside. I can hear it pattering as it hits the roof outside the window and drips down the gutter outside the corner of my room. When I was younger I would lie in bed listening to the rain falling outside until I fell asleep. I remember that I used to consider it musical and to think that there were patterns in the sound of the rainfall. When I hear it now, it feels geometric and the dark blue-grey of storm clouds.

There is a gutter that runs in front of our property. When it rains hard, the water rushes through. My brother and I would be outside on the banks, making leaf and stick boats to race from one end of the property to the other. Sometimes they would get stuck in the tunnel that runs under the driveway and in my mind some boat-eater lurked within.

I remember that hopping from one bank to the other was the largest leap a ten year old could dare when falling into the water was a danger. Of course, we waded through that gutter with impunity, so getting wet wasn’t the problem; falling into the water was like getting lost.

I remember that it became a river within my imagination somewhere beyond my home and boundaries.

Hearing the rain outside is one of the things that I missed this year in college. My room was to high to hear it hitting the ground and I couldn’t hear it hit the roof. I didn’t realize I missed it until I came home.

Dragons

Whenever I take a look at the scaly skin that is over the joints that join the fingers to the palm of the hand I wonder if we used to be dragons. Of course, this is completely ridiculous, but I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy and part of me doesn’t think it’s that impossible that dragons once existed. Maybe that’s why we cant find them anywhere. Maybe they used to be us.

Today was a dragon day. The sky got dark and cloudy, but not in a dreary way rather in the way that is exciting because a storm is coming and it’s bringing thunder. The sky seems lower on days like this; more like a ceiling. The wind picked up and it smelled like rain. Every bird high in the sky could have been a dragon.

Dragon days go back to when I was reading the Dragonriders of Pern. All dragons in my imagination are Pern dragons. When I was 12, I wished I could be a dragonrider. I guess it’s not surprising then that I can look at scaly skin and prefer evolution from dragons than apes. It might be completely implausible, but I like believing that we used to be graceful on the wind and that there may still be some magic left in us.