This Month's Story
It rained last night.
Actually it has been raining for several days, but last night’s rain capped a day of exceptionally heavy rain.
As I lay deep in the warmth of our blanket, I could hear the rain coming from across the field toward the old farmhouse. It came in strong gusts, with the wind pushing these gusts in hard pulses that hit the house’s siding and the roof above me. Lying there half asleep, it seemed that the pulses of rain that hit the roof belonged to small groups of scurrying mice.
I lay there listening.
The aluminum siding had been put on the house years ago by some salesman from some town nearby. He had probably told Regina that it “added to the insulation and would save her money.” He gouged her even further by talking her into adding a window in the upper bedroom and taking out another in the same room.
We weren’t told about this until we came by the farm after all the work was done. Well, he did use real aluminum siding. Maybe it will be worth something as scrap when we tear the house down.
Regina was a warm, friendly person, easily conned by people such as that tin man. The hundred plus years old barn went the because of a set of similar blather. Only that time no money changed hands. The men offered to take it off her hands “for whatever value we might get for the wood.”
When we tried to add insulation to the house the first winter we were here, the contractor was a little more honest.
He examined the house and told us that the kitchen was the only place he could add insulation, the older rest of the house had vertical planking that went from the ground to the roof, two stories up.
“You can’t add insulation to that kind of construction and, besides you really don’t need to. What you have there will keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer.”
Now I lay in my bed listening to heavy rain hitting the aluminum-coated wood plank siding.
Once in awhile, an extra strong flare of wind would come, pushing the rain hard ahead of it. As this heavier rain hit the roof it sounded like the small groups of mice were changing to large herds of mice, to multitudes of mice, all running, racing, galloping noisily across the roof to some fearful destination to the other side of the house.
I lay there and listened to these sounds and their abrupt changing cadence, safe under warm covers. Out in the hall, the banjo shaped clock Stella had bought at a sale at the Bombay Company, struck the hour. It made an ominous sound, the single tones resonating ominously in the dark.
The clock is pretty and I liked it, but it has one fault: it does not tell what hour had arrived. When it sounds every fifteen minutes, it just rings the Westminster notes that denote what part of the hour has come. So tonight, as in other nights, I know that another hour has passed, but I do not know which one.
Then just as the last note of its hours end tone was dieing amidst the dark, there was a massive rush of wind, as if that last note of our clock had been a signal. This new wind brought with it an exceptionally prolonged flurry of hard rain and, when this rain was gone, there fell a period of silence, as if the god of rain’s goatskin had at last burst and after that one great flood of rain there would be no more water.
We keep the house cold at night to save on the use of our heating oil. Now, I could feel the cold of the room on my face and my left hand that I had left outside the covers. The rest of my body, safely warmed by its own heat under the down wrap, felt secure against whatever change would come next.
A handbreadth away from me, Stella slept, her soft breathing telling me she was sound asleep, far from this cold room and roof with its legions of gusty winds and scurrying mice.
So I was alone and, when the rain started again, I pushed myself into the warm quilt and pillow savoring the almost exotic feeling of loneliness and the warm security.
There is a difference between a rain at night and a rain during the day. A rain during the day produces a gambit of moods, all of them vibrant, all different.
Years ago, I was stationed in the southern part of Cuba where it only rained once in the two years I was there. On that day, we ran naked out of the barracks and showered ourselves with soap, laughing and jumping about like children in the hard downpour.
A rain during a late autumn day is filled with low clouds and somber stark colors and a book and low conversation between friends, maybe a fire in a stone fireplace, the fire screen pushed to one side, the flames lapping around the logs and the window next nearby giving splashes of cold rain and the cold signs of the late fall season.
A rain during the small hours of a late autumn night is not like that. A rain at night is a solitary thing with just the sound of it hitting the roof, the wall or window providing the strength and depth of the event.
There is almost nothing else.
There is no shape, no color; your eyes are closed and always, adding to the vagueness of it all, sleep hangs, floating softly in the background, lulling any attempts at real thought, ready to slip in almost unnoticed and become the dominant presence.
But until that happens, you lay still in your bed, trying to stay between the sense of being fully awake and deep asleep, caught in between by the clock in another room’s heavy touch of the quarter hour.
This can be a battle of delicate balances.
I remember once getting up to do something in the mid hours of another long ago winter’s night years ago. I had found in the living room a full moon lighting all of the land beyond my window with a soft silver light.
In the moonlight, everything was different then when the same scene was viewed by daylight. I had turned an armchair about and, pulling an afghan around me, sat back to enjoy the scene. Soon however, I became fully awake and the cold began slipping in beneath the cover and my leg became stiff from sitting in a cramped position.
I realized the moment had passed and left the scene to return to bed, leaving its memory to be gone, except for brief moments of recall such as now.
The feelings evoked by a rain at night such as last night are not like that.
As the rain falls, you lay listening, half asleep and time drifts on and on. You find yourself moving in and out of consciousness, feeling as you do the soft warmth of the covers, the dark of the room, and always the noise of the rain, drifting with you in and out of your sleep, falling sometimes in rushes, sometimes in a soft, steady drumming.
In the morning when you awake, you will have almost forgotten what had occurred during the rain swept night. Forgotten except for the sense of having had a pleasant sleep and a faint hope for others, many others, of the same.
