project 23 :: april showers. share one of your favorite rainy day memories.

rain and i just do not get along. when out in the rain, i am much like a cat in the rain: i look thoroughly insulted as i stalk fro overhang to overhang with my ears laid back. and when the rain comes to town, my head hurts so badly get physically ill sometimes. as a result, i don't really have a "favorite" rainy day memory. most days i would rather the rain go on by without any memory at all. sleep is a big thing for me when it rains.

but that doesn't mean i don't have any rainy day memories at all. rain and i didn't disagree quite so much when i was younger. like most kids, i thought rain was pretty cool some of the time.

when i was younger and i actually had a somewhat intact family (adoptive father, but i'd never really gotten to know my real father so he might as well have been biological), both my parents worked, often late. yes, miss domy was a latchkey kid. i rarely brought over friends, heck, as a kid i didn't have many friends. it's amazing that i have any social skills at all. but every once in awhile, i did have my best friend over after school. and one of those days was stormy. really stormy.

at the time i lived in a 3 story with an attack, a basement, and an enclosed side porch that went from front to back. it was one of those big, spacious homes with a fireplace. you don't see homes like that in cali and that house is one thing i would love to transplant out here. unfortunately, even if i could do that, there's not too many places with the space for it. california is really stingy on space.

so this friend and i went to my house after school one day. it made sense for her to come to my place, it was only right around the corner from the school while she would have had to walk a good 5 or 6 blocks or so to get to her own house. shortly after we got in, the rain really began to come down, i remember it being as dark as night and it being the middle of the afternoon, and the lightening and thunder started.

we had gone from nasty rainy day to a storm of devastating strength in a matter of seconds.

being kids, we started to go upstairs to go play in my room. bad idea. we barely made the landing before the lights were knocked out. creeping back down the stairs, we crawled into the living room. of course, the wind is hitting the house. now this was an older house and older houses tend to creak in low winds. these were not low winds.

here we are, two preteens, in a dark house - no candles - that's creaking and groaning like it's coming alive.

we decided being cold was better than being inside, in the dark, in a house that was ready to eat us for being there and dived to the porch where we huddled until my folks came home.

adults and candles never looked so good.