Rainy days are here again...

I absolutely love rainy days. They take me back to a special little happy place. Today's a nice, dreary, gloomy, drizzly day here. This summer's been fairly dry; a lot of the corn was lost last year due to floods - this year the problem was not enough rain. We haven't had a great deal of thunderstorms this year, either. The few that we have had were fairly weak, with one or two exceptions. Another of my favorite pass-times is watching the weather, both online (The Weather Channel, NOAA on the web, Weather Underground) and outside either on the porch or giving chase in the car. While I do love the excitement that seeing severe weather can bring, I'm kind of glad at the same time that we haven't had too much of it. The first time I heard the tornado sirens here was kind of crazy.

In late February of '08, about a month and a half after I moved down here to Indiana, there was one particularly strong, unseasonable storm that scared the holy daylights out of me. The sirens went off around the same time that the power started flickering, and so I bolted for the closet that was closest to the anatomical center of the building. At the time, we were still living in an "efficiency" apartment in what used to be an historical home. It was likely one of the most spacious and beautiful in its own time, but had been converted into four apartment units at some point in the last 50 or so years. The closet that I found myself taking refuge in was approximately one-and-a-half feet deep by two feet wide. So there I sat, my fat fanny squished into this tiny little hole in the wall that reeked of cat piss, crying my eyes out on the phone with my mother. She just laughed at me, although she wasn't as certain as Marco was that a tornado was "impossible" in Vincennes.

After all the action outside died down, I couldn't help but laugh at myself. The closet wouldn't have protected me had a tornado ripped through town. In fact, I'd be willing to wager that I would've been more likely to be injured, at least if the building collapsed, as it likely would have in its state of disrepair. It was then that I realized that I would prefer to chase and watch the storms when they come instead of hiding. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it), there haven't been many severe storms still. At any rate, I don't hide from storms anymore.

Another thing about the rain, especially when it's just plain ol' rain and not accompanied by thunder, is that it can save you on your water bill if utilized properly. When I was a kid, I loved pulling my swimsuit on and running outside for a shower in a huge downpour. For some reason, though, I don't think my parents were really too crazy about my sister and I bathing in the rain. I can remember twice offhand that I got away with doing it, though: once across the street in the church parking lot over the storm drain and another time in the driveway.

There's not a great deal of things I can really remember from when I was growing up (one tends to block a lot out when there are some traumatizing things going on at the same time), although I didn't lose all  my memories. Somehow, I've managed to hang onto some really good ones... the kind that make you giggle and grin just thinking back on them... I suppose, in a way, this blog is my way of trying to remind myself of all the small joys of life. After all, this is kind of my little experiment to find my own happy... and I think it just might be working. One week in and I'm really enjoying it.