I didn't fall asleep until 6am this morning. Maybe it was the sound of the heavy rain falling, maybe it was all the caffeine from the tea I drank that evening, maybe it was all the thoughts running through my mind. It was 5am when I came downstairs to get a cup of water, when I heard what I thought was a radio playing a song against the background of the rain. It seemed to have voice, it seemed to have melody. As I searched for this radio that I had thought someone had left on by accident, I listened more carefully at the sound. It wasn't a radio at all, but the sounds of the raindrops hitting the objects that my parents had in the backyard, a slow and melancholy song of the things forgotten and left behind in the rain. I sat in the darkness and listened to the rhythm of the falling rain until it lulled me to sleep.
It's raining pretty hard today, the rain doesn't seem to have an end, and the windows of my parents' house aren't splattered with rain, but rather, could be mistaken for waterfalls, as the constantly running streams of water flow down the glass surface.
Somewhere in the distance, there's a car alarm that was activated by the rain which hasn't switched off yet.
I don't remember a storm this bad since I was a boy. My parents had put together a playground set in the backyard -- swingset, slide, a teeter-totter that spun instead of teeter-tottering. They had dug a gigantic pit in the backyard for this playground set, and when this storm happened, my parents and I watched as the pit filled with water over the course of days. Our playground set was now submerged in 6 to 9 inches of water. When the storm finally ended, we had a muddy pool in our backyard. My father, on the following weekend, rented a pump to bilge the water out. We removed the playground set a few years afterward, and placed a aluminum pool there for a summer. Over the years, the pit has filled in, grass has taken root, and you can barely tell what used to be there.
It's interesting to go into the backyard that I grew up in -- it seems both smaller and larger, if such a thing is possible. The trees have all certainly grown, small saplings that I remember being planted as a boy now are these immense full-size trees that seem to think that the sky is the limit. All the strawberry plants are gone now, and we've lost a few rosebushes. There is a larger variety of plants in the backyard than I remember, and their diversity amazes me.
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