Rainy Day Reflection

Our usual slow summer afternoons for gardening, swimming, cookouts, parks, and play are on hold. The rainy days have locked us in and down. The walls crawl up our backs and down our chests and press heavy there. 

Slow growing in the garden. Chickens won’t lay eggs. The pigs feed bucket sloshes with water leaving muck and mud for the children to wade through to empty and fill and repeat again. Boots are a must. Shoes in summer do not fit together.

We line up the boots (or toss them) on the front porch and spend our days indoors making music, writing stories, lining up animals, pushing cars, reading books, Legos, puzzles, games -- and doing it again.  

Seems like we are cooking and cleaning a lot. I’m painting the walls, trying to cheer it up and it turns into a long project I don’t want to finish.

Our beautiful Lucy dog heaves on the floor. It is hard to tell if she is getting old or if she thinks the rain is getting old, but she is still heaving and she is a middle aged dog. 

George and I remember when she was a puppy. The children don’t. There isn’t a picture of her then – at least not in a frame, up on a wall or shelf. There isn’t one in my laptop. We know there were pictures of her but we ached to think they were lost when the last computer lost all things.

We are telling the children how tiny and soft she was. While we talk, we pull our dinosaur laptop just to check. There they are. Just a few. Enough. Our sweet little Lucy as a loyal puppy curled tight napping in the mountains. She is on a hike with George. There is George holding her tight next to him like a baby.

A baby. We have had three of our own babies since then. There are pictures there of George Wilder. We can’t help but look at them and tell the tales.

Here we are pacing the floor waiting for the rain (or at least the thunder and lightening) to stop. Time seems to stand still.

But we look over at Lucy’s aging face and wise eyes. We watch a video of George singing to Amelia when she is hours old. The time isn’t standing still.