rainy day

A rainy sunday.  Thick drops flood our deck as they paint the cement dark, heavy air hanging lazily while the sky and sea blur to be one, dressed the same shade of blue.

It's everyone's day off, but we see no one.  No kids playing soccer at the church, nobody works in their garden, nobody stands around talking, leaning, laughing against fence posts.  Rain drives them inside. No bells on the hillsides.  Even the birds have gone to bed.  Quiet prevails.

We woke up late.  The time change didn't help.  Tea, breakfast, more tea, we nurse light hangovers as we lay back in bed to watch a movie about love.  The rain steady and heavy.  4 pm comes fast, the day passing us by.  Inside, hiding from that water, that cold.  Remembering times in rain and all the wetness of the Pacific Northwest.  We grow nostalgic, love it, and need to be in it.  Raincoats on, we step out.

Up a hill, past empty playgrounds, "yassas" to wet chickens, lemons dripping from their trees.  My hair grows heavy so quickly, sticking to my forehead.  Pants wet to the knees.  The road curves as we climb the mountain, past a small church, the place where the road fell to the sea, and to where the cement begins again.  We come to a look out, that ocean so many shades of blue, a rainbow now growing out from the middle of it, curving to land on a mountain top.  We sip some ouzo from a bottle and walk on, across and down, turning left on a soggy brown puddled street leading to a grass field and a small, old building.  A church.  On the beach.

We go in, through small blue doors, dripping water to the floor.  11 wicker chairs, and a podium decorated with a crumbling bible.  I have the urge to pick it up, to see what passage it would fall open to.  But all my beliefs and non believing hold me back, so I touch the spine, gently, almost as an afterthought.  I light a white candle, put it in a bowl of sand.  Walk outside just as the sun is burning through the clouds.  Sit down with the pebbles and small pulsing waves and Abbey talks to me, says something about...
  
              how, the world spins so fast, and here we are, this little dot in the geography of this planet, and we are still alive through it all, our hands functioning so well as we hold small pebbles, old pieces of this earth traveling across the ocean to land at our feet, and we feel so still, but in truth we spin and we spin and we spin as the moon moves the waves, and she reminds me of a sentence I read in India, that, for some reason, sticks with me.  Coming to the surface at moments like these, short and sweet:
  
             "All this and I am still alive.  I fear I have no death."  (Tagore). 

And, also, how
  
             "The world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, only none of us realize it.  The    happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream." (Kerouac).  

And that is the point.

(Drawings courtesy of Abbey Koshak)