Morning Walk and The Awakening Rain

The Awakening Rain 

The Sky from the housewindow was a threatening grey; dull as an old white t-shirt that has never seen bleach. There were days when all she wanted to do was stay inside and putter around the house but today she woke up wanting to turn cartwheels in the freshly mown grass; drink in the intoxicating aroma of the gardenias that she didn’t even know were in her yard, and explore the idiosyncrasies of her neighborhood.  

Tying up white and purple Converse tennis shoes she heads to the door and then stalls at the threshold anticipating either a chill or the breath-repressing humidity which has kept her in the suffocating darkness of her house up until this moment. She takes a deep breath and shifts one tennis-shoed foot over the threshold out into—Rain.

Hesitating she turns around to go back inside, drat, I don’t want to get soaked. I guess I’ll just go watch T.V., she thinks to herself.   

Oddly enough her feet head her off toward her bedroom closet where her hands find a lime green and pink polka dotted umbrella and she heads back outside. Instead of the chill or humidity she was dreading, what she finds is a deep clean scent of earth which slowly calms and renews her spirit of how good it is to be alive.  

Yes, the surrounding sky and air are dull but the colors, the colors are as if she had stepped into an Andy Warhol painting! Lavender, red, and hot pink Impatiens flow out of hanging planters at the Schiller’s house; milky white Gardenias are seen a little further down the road and orange hibiscus pop out of green bushes. But the Greens— now they were something else. The greens would make any painter’s palette envy with its variety of shades! She saw waxy, shiny green brown leaves jump off of Magnolia trees; woodsy deep green needled pines and ghostly gray green moss drape the oak trees adding to her experience of awakening.

As she walked down the street yellow lights glimmer through curtained windows as if it was a snowy December morning in the west and not May 16^th in Florida.  The first snow in a town is beautiful but I’ll take rain over snow any day. It’s usually so cold and reverberates through my already cold prone body. Here the rain is tepid and soothing.

Here’s the funny thing about Florida, dead leaves can be seen lying amongst new growing fruit on a fig tree or in gutters even while new shoots form on the oak trees; there is never an end to the circle of seasons that happen weekly here. I guess the growing seasons can become confused just like for the best of us.

She ambles along with every step she feels lighter and lighter. A woman was walking from the opposite direction with her small white Chow and when they meet she smiles first at the woman and then at the dog that is sniffing her pant leg. Poor dog won’t find any kindred or opposing dog smells from me. We haven’t had a dog in 7 years. Too bad we can’t have one again. Roxey was a sweet, beautiful and loving German Shepard. It’s sad that she couldn’t be happy staying in our yard and kept running away from home. I really would have like to have kept her. Maybe we can get another dog someday however it would have to be a smaller dog this time. Open handed she reaches down and pets the Chow, says “have a good day,” to the woman, and keeps walking.

Reaching the end of her subdivision she turns around and heads back to the house— When she is done she will have walked 2 ½ miles round trip. That’s a fairly good walk if I say so myself..

The rain is building up in strength and her pant legs are getting wet; by the time she arrives home she is soaked. Well, I guess I timed that out right; now to dry off and spend sometime writing and reading. What should I write about?

Smiling to herself she has a small inclination of what will be typed today. . .

  

Mckenna (not me)