Lazy when it rains
When did this rain start? Yesterday. Sometime in the early afternoon. I realized I had not watered my plants because our hairdresser came with the lady who does the mani-pedi and that took almost the whole morning. When I went to our tiny porch to water plants, hard rain fell. When I went to refill my tub—that’s English for tabo in Tagalog—I looked out the bedroom window on the other side. It wasn’t raining. This got me giggling. I turned and told my husband, “It’s like rainy in half of the house, but on the other side it’s dry! Look, I can see a sheet of rain approaching but out back it’s already raining hard.”
Soon it began not only to rain hard, it began with the scary precursor: lightning in multiple flashes followed by rolls upon rolls of outraged thunder that made our bed shake. I brought down the screen to avoid getting horrified by the lightning but couldn’t escape the thunder. When I was a little girl and there was a thunderstorm, my mother would hold me in her fragrant arms and say, “That’s just your Pappy and his friends playing bowling in the sky.” Then we laughed together. But now my mother is gone and I’m too old not to get scared.
On the one hand, I love this weather. The glass windows are spattered with water. Plants’ leaves tremble in the wind. I don’t feel like doing anything really. My worktable is littered with the start of a rosary, an experiment with an old cross, two medals I’ve glued together back to back —all sorts of things begun then dropped as quickly. Instead, I sat calmly playing Solitaire, then one with those colorful birds that you group on branches until they fly away. Eventually I got up and juiced oranges I bought for precisely that reason but didn’t feel like juicing the limes I bought for the same reason.
Let’s face it. Rainy days like this one make me totally lazy. I want to either sit in a comfortable chair and play silly games or stay in bed and watch TV the day long, but my life won’t let me. I have a class on Saturday. I have to write the second lesson but this weather gets my brain soggy, dripping. It refuses to think. It doesn’t even enjoy being poked.
In the end, I just do as I please, wake up when I want, sleep when I can, stare at the gray sky and big water drops as they skittishly run down the glass, enjoy life on my terms, get extremely lazy when it rains.
By the way, I may have forgotten to tell you I’m teaching writing again. It’s a class of six sessions where I want to teach those who enrolled to write about a lesson life has taught them, but to not preach like many people do. I want them to describe their feelings, how the lesson almost invisibly crept up on them, how long it took them to realize that God was discreetly teaching them something and finally realizing what a great lesson it was. That’s my idea. I still have to figure out how to do it. I hope it doesn’t rain again tomorrow so I can do something useful.
Last Saturday was my first day of classes. I was surprised to find I would have 11 students. Two of them were my students before. One texted me saying that she had, one afternoon, thought of all the seminars she had taken and decided that my writing seminar was the best. That made me soar, built my confidence again, but now it’s crumpled and mushy from this wonderful interminable rain. The other one, who is taking my class for the third time, said she’s taking it because she doesn’t want to let go of her ability to write manually. My class is the best exercise for that. Right now I cannot see how I can teach it on a computer. I like face-to-face teaching. It gives us so much more connection with each other.
We become permanent friends. After last Saturday’s class we had a reunion of one of my earliest classes. Seven of us got together for early drinks and food at Rockwell. We hadn’t seen each other in three years, since just before the pandemic. We are all aging well. Fred and his wife Carmel are in their 90s but Fred still drives himself to Intramuros to teach. I am turning 79 soon but my Chinese friends say no celebrations until I’m 81 because it’s bad luck to celebrate your 79th or 80th. Just like they said a Monkey (me) should never marry a Tiger (my husband) as they will never get along; but a Leo (me) and an Aries (he) will have tons of fun together. Who really knows?
In the end, I just do as I please, wake up when I want, sleep when I can, stare at the gray sky and big water drops as they skittishly run down the glass, enjoy life on my terms, get extremely lazy when it rains.