Walking the Wall

I’m sitting on my front porch listening to the sound of rain beating
down on the aluminum roof, thunder seems to roll out from one end of
the sky to the other and fade off into the distance, a slow deep rumble
instead of the sometimes sharp cracks of thunder that are often heard,
but not tonight, tonight is deep rolling thunder. Once the rumble fades
into the distance, the neighborhood lights up with quick flashes of
lightening. All this is repeated over and over, always the dinking
sound of the rain on the aluminum roof drumming out a cadence to the
sound of the storm. I have a friend who moved from this area to north
eastern Maine where are there are few thunderstorms, she has told me on
more than one occasion that she misses the lightening storms, and I
can understand why. I remember camping in a tent as a little girl with
my family, I can still remember the sound of the rain on the roof of
the tent, it was a more muted sound as it hit tight fabric rather than
shiny metal and the lightening made shadows stand out in sharp contrast
as the inside of the tent flared to light with its flashes. Laying in
the tent with my mom and my dad and my brothers, I don’t have any
memory of being afraid, I just remember loving the sound of the rain. I
remember one time when I was growing up when it started raining while
my older brother and I were outside, but the most amazing thing was, we
could see the line where it went from raining, to not raining at all.
One of us could stand in the rain and the other stand outside the rain
and be perfectly dry–it was like magic. I never saw anything like that
again until I was a teenager in Togo, West Africa, I was staying at a
blind school in a valley surrounded by low mountains, standing outside,
we watched a wall of rain sweep down the mountain, across the valley,
then across the yard and right over the top of us–over almost as soon
as it started–it washed over us and everything it left behind was
washed clean in a natural baptism. There is something sacred about rain
and I can’t help but wonder what it’s saying when the sky talks at
night.