Magical Rain
I’m really happy when it rains. I love the smell of earth when it’s just starting to drizzle, the feel of wet grass on my bare feet and the sound of the pitter-pattering of water on the roof. I even composed a song with just the tapping of the rain as my accompaniment. I don’t remember how the song goes but it was mostly filled with la, la, las and dum dee dums. I was just 6 when I composed that, I know not too many words then.
Rain reminds me so much of my childhood when I still used to live in the province of La Union. Unlike other kids that thunder seems petrifying, I on the other hand will be dancing with joy upon hearing it. Because to me it only meant one thing, rain. And when it does start pouring down, I would hurriedly run outside and holler for my playmates to join me welcoming the rain. We had two kinds of ritual dances for the rain, one was if we were wishing for one to come and the other one was a thanksgiving dance. We just made it up of course. There were a lot of yelling “woohoos”, jumping up and down, turning around and yodeling. One of my playmates was very talented when it comes to that. He yodels the ABC and even the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I wonder what happened to him though, I was quite sure that he’ll land a job in the music or entertainment industry perhaps. But I never heard from him ever since we left the place and transferred here in Manila. After getting quite asphyxiated for too much dancing and mild aneurysm for too much shouting we’ll all flop down to the ground and start a laugh trip. We’ll just laugh about anything that our eyes can see. We’ll laugh at a bird perched on a tree having a difficulty getting the worm inside her chick’s mouth, we’ll laugh at the dog under the car that shivers every time he hears the rumbling thunder and we’ll even laugh at a cat that was very soggy and fully drenched and does not resemble a cat anymore but more of a wet feather duster. And then we will all close our eyes and wish for the rain not to stop so we can all stay outside longer. We’ll be playing in the mud puddles and get a huge chunk of mud and begin throwing it playfully on each other’s faces. We don’t have snow here in the Philippines so we improvised. We called it “mud balls.” I remember that we’ll even try to build our own “forts”. We’ll gather whatever materials that we can get our hands into and build small “barracks” out of it. And if we get tired of hiding, we’ll be going out of our forts armed with our mud balls and start throwing aimlessly at “enemy’s” camp. Whoever shouts “RETREAT” first loses. Our little army never lost a war. We were brave and feisty little soldiers. Then we’ll go to a nearby boggy marsh and find frogs and tadpoles. We had this game wherein whoever gets to catch the most number of tadpoles and keep it in your hand wins but it almost always seemed futile because they swim so fast making it very hard to catch them and very slimy as well. That even if we already caught them but if they started squirming in our hands, we’ll throw them back in the water screaming with nervous surprise. So we decided that all tadpoles caught but thrown back in the water were counted because it was impossible to let any of them stay in our hands for more than one second. Well, those who haven’t caught any, we’ll be hopping and leaping with us like frogs until we reach our next destination. We were a bunch of adventurous kids I should say. We’d try climbing trees even though we know that the barks were very wet and slippery. We’d think “Where’s the challenge in climbing a tree if it’s dry and our feet will stick easily to the trunk while ascending it?” So that explains the couple of scars on my legs because I fell not too many times while trying to climb it. But I didn’t mind the bruises, not at all. I was having so much fun that I was oblivious to the pain it was causing me. Sometimes I would even sprain my ankle or my elbow. And there was this one time that I went home with a black eye because we were playing tag and I was running so fast that I did not notice the protruding branch and BAM! goes my eye unto it. It hurt like crazy but I’d always tell myself that I’ll worry about mom’s scolding and the alcohol’s sting later but for now I’ll just enjoy this until the rain lasts. When the rain finally stops, we’ll get so bummed out because we need to go home already. We cannot let our wet clothes stick to us for long or else our mothers will be hunting us down.
I grew up thinking of the rain that way. Something that would bring me back to that enchanted time when all that I needed to worry about was what our next adventure would be like and not the bills to pay, problems to solve, past due promotions and all the nerve racking questions about life that your brain can come up to. It was a time when we let our imagination ran wild and think-up of things that were out of the ordinary. It was a time that we’ll laugh our hearty laughs not for anything else but just for the sake of laughing. It was our “pretend time” where in we could be anyone or anything that we would like to be. It did not matter whether who did well in school or did not. We were all equals. We can be kings and queens if we wanted to because it was our own private universe. We were holding time at the palm of our little hands. And it was solely up to us if we were going to speed it up or slow it down. The world was at our tiny teeny feet. Our own magical place where tears and sorrow never existed. A place built only on fun, happiness and laughter. So every time I get put out and feels like the weight of the world are on my shoulders or just simply getting stuck in the traffic because of flooded streets or gets stranded for a couple of hours because of the hard rain, some people would curse and shout expletives at the rain but not I. You know what I do? I just simply smile and start to sing la, la, la, dee, dee, dum, dee, dum and move to the beat of the thanksgiving rain dance in my head and I’m home again.
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