While on a walk with my daughter, the storm clouds gathered. Then, we heard the downpour before we felt it. In fact, we could see it. Like sheets of water falling down one after the other, like marching legs, the rain came towards us.
“It’s raining there but not here! And it’s coming towards us!” We shrieked and huddled under the umbrella I brought along and waited. It felt the same way it feels at the beach when you brace yourself against a coming wave. But, unlike the wave that crashes, we felt only the steady drops of rain on our umbrella. And then they stopped and continued on behind us.
It was a giant heavenly sprinkler. The back and forth of it made us smile on our walk; sometimes the rain drenched us, and in the next minute, a clearing into the muggy, buggy air.
I walked beside my teenager and thought about the back and forth of emotions, of good days and bad days, of just what it means to be human. One minute, the downpour. The next, the clear sky.
We kept walking. And we huddled close when the rain came again.