Miracle Rain

I grew up and currently live in California, so for most of my life my understanding of rain and my thoughts and feelings about it were stereotypical:

"What is this wet stuff falling from the sky?! It is getting in the way, disrupting life, and it is so depressing!"

But I went to college in Eastern Washington and my roommate freshman year was from Portland, so I began to hear different thoughts, different philosophies about rain, if you will.

For instance there was an afternoon in September, or October, freshman year when Roomie and I were walking to the HUB. It was an extremely moist and misty fog spread thick through campus, which was all green grass and pine trees and old brick buildings (the campus where you see pictures on the website and in brochures and are like, “it doesn't really look like this,” then you get there, and it does). She had on Pumas, jeans, a long sleeve shirt, her beloved old puffy vest, gloves and a scarf, hands in pockets of puffy vest but not looking cold; she was born for this weather. I had on Nikes, jeans, a sweatshirt and was feeling quite cold worrying about how much colder it was going to get as the frozen moisture starting burning my nose, when she "soccer moms" her arm out in front of me like she's driving, I'm her kid passenger, and we had to break hard and fast.

"What?" I proclaim, completely startled.
She has her eyes and head darting around, her arm still held out, then she looks up, closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath through her nostrils.
"What?" I again ask watching her closely having no idea what is going on, and a little frustrated she scared me like that, as visible warm air exits her nose.
"Smell that?" She says as what ended up being half question and then half demand because I, the Californian, had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
"Smell what?"
"Rain! Can't you smell it?"

She looks at me, her eyes real big like a kid in a candy store who can smell the decadent chocolate permeating throughout, the trail of smell floating around the room like in a cartoon and then swipes under her nose... but it doesn't pass under mine, yet.

And I don't know about you, but at the time, the smell of rain was no wear near chocolate. Rain smell in California is often the rain drying, evaporating, and burning off the dirty, polluted black pavement, when the sun comes back out. It is gross, nauseating even. So that is the smell I thought of, and again am unfortunately thinking of as I reminisce, when she asked me to smell rain. But that was sense memory, not me actually smelling the rain right then and there in the Northwest while walking through a gorgeous campus in September, or October. So I did as she said. I mean if she loved it so much, and I trust her, and why would she lie, and the look on her face wasn't of lies, it was of love, love of rain. So I closed my eyes, with head tilted up, inhaled deeply, and something changed in me that day, or began to anyway, like I was cleaned out of old bad sense memories from rain in California and reintroduced to rain for the first time, the rain God created it to be.

She smiled again because I was now smiling in amazement, getting a glimpse of what the wet stuff is supposed to do to my emotions and senses and my lungs for that matter, or at least what it should, because it felt good to breath in clean moist air. It felt healing and like a little surreal perfect moment in time as we walked down an old path through a picture perfect campus in the at-times-perfect-Northwest like two refreshed and renewed college students in a misty haze that took us into a Narnia-type magically clean and distant world away from the stress of studying and learning and growing up away from home...mmmmm. I can smell it now.

And rain is more than that "before rain smell." There is a "during rain smell" and an "after rain smell," I went on to learn. And it becomes instinctive, smelling these smells. Your body can also just learn to tell when it feels like rain. Your body can even tell when the earth looks thirsty and all the leaves and trees and plants and blades of grass are somehow, in their plant-like ways, opening up their mouths, tongues out, up towards the skies waiting and praying for the floodgates to open and slake their thirst. Rain, I began to learn, is all smell, look, feel (many kinds of feel) and so much more. It is a little miracle...

So Roomie and I had class together MWF Spring Semester at 9:20ish; it was our first class of the day for both of us. I would get up early, to eat "breakfast" and take some of my meds in proper orders and at proper times and study some more. She would sleep until I woke her up five minutes before I was leaving. Most mornings she would be sleeping there with her blankie on her pillow, her head on her blankie, her arm around her moosh pillow and Frogger (I bought her this little frog beanie baby with a Santa hat on it for Christmas) in her hand. Sweetest thing ever, then I would yell at her to get up for the fifth time, like a mom, telling her, "You can get up now and walk with me to class or you can walk by yourself trying to catch up. Make a choice." Mind you I have her backpack on her chair and orange juice in her Nalgene and I had grabbed her a granola bar, all she has to do is find pants and a sweatshirt and follow my figure down the hall, down the stairs, then to class. Simple enough, right? Well, she often had to catch up. Good thing I am old and slow and it didn't take her very long.

But there was one morning in the spring. It hadn't snowed in a while but there was still the snow on the ground that was really ice and it had been dead grey and brown all around for quite a while. We had a big test so we were Rory Gilmore-ing it through campus, walking side by side, flipping through flashcards, quizzing each other back and forth, taking up the path, completely unaware of other people, completely unaware the path could be for more people other than us. She was giving me a great study tip about boutonniere deformity, it's this finger thing involving flexion and extension of different joints, she told me to hold my finger like a hook of a pirate and think of a pirate's booty. I, because of Buffy, hold my finger and go, "Grrr, arrgh," and move it across the "screen" (the front of my face), from right to left like the little monster does at the end of the show, and then get a laugh because I like Buffy and the little monster, and then think of booty and get another laugh, because sometimes I am five years old. It works though, helps me remember obviously to this day…but there we were speed walking through campus holding the hook up, taking up the whole path like we owned the school, people having to walk on wet grass around us and on the outside of the path that had been mowed that morning, getting wet grass clippings all over their shoes and looking at us like, "Who do they think they are?" and we are kinda aware of this, that they are frustrated with us, but at the same time we don't care because we don't care in general, because we want to walk on the path, and we don't care because we are laughing about the pirate's booty thing and freaking out about the test we are about to fail, when I "soccer mom" her this time.

"What?" She questions.
"What's different?" I ask as we have now stopped in the middle of the path and people are even more frustrated with us.
"What are you talking about?"
"Something is different, with campus. Something is different. What is it?"
"Nothing, we're gonna be late." She tries to keep walking, but I don't let her. It's bugging me, and I am not sure I can figure it out on my own.
"No we won't, and what is it? It's something, I just know it. It looks different."
"They mowed the grass. Let's go." She starts walking, breaking through my "soccer mom" arm.
"Wait!" I exclaim. Boy are people staring. "It's green! The grass is green!" Man I am making it worse. She walks back to me and has that, don't talk so loud look on her face.
"Yes, it is green," she kinda whispers. "Good job. Let's go." She is pulling my arm to try to move me now.
"No. You don't get it, do you?" Brief pause, as I kinda wait to see if she will figure it out. "It wasn't green yesterday."
She just kinda looks at me thinking about what I just said, then looks around, then back at me in a bewildered disbelief. I look around with her, fully taking it in, while watching her take it in.
"Yeah," I continue, "it was brown yesterday, and we overheard it rained when we were in the lounge right now, and it looks like it rained, it smells like it rained, and now the grass is GREEN!"

We have a moment where a camera, were it on us for a film or something, would have been zoomed in on me and my excited happy face, then switched to her and her amazed face with a smile beginning to form, then the view of us looking around, then pulled up and all around us as we look around—quickly, this is all quickly because we are bordering on late—and have a quick moment with what I from then call...

"It's miracle rain! Brown grass one day. Green the next."
"Miracle rain, huh?" She says with a half smile, kinda smiling at the miracle, more smiling at me because I am a little crazy, but at least entertaining.
"Miracle rain," I say with a smile that was similar to hers when she smelled the chocolate rain. Miracle rain.

We ran to class and probably bombed the test pretty well. But the test is obviously not what I want to remember about that day, that morning. I had become a North-westerner, with a Northwestern eye. I had seen and noticed right away The Miracle Rain. The student became the master for a moment. It was beautiful and so was the grass. Overnight, dead-grey-brown to rich, dark, strong and alive green! Only God can do stuff like that, especially overnight, and only His beloved children can notice and appreciate and stand in awe in the middle of a crowded pathway, even and especially on a busy stressful morning. We can and should help one another appreciate and fall in love with His everyday miracles more regularly and frequently! Such as The Miracle of Rain.



I must note that there were many other miracles these beutiful friends introduced, in a sense, me to. Other places and things roommates and newfound family members taught me to love and appreciate, things of God. I hope to remember and write more mini stories like this one in the big story of How I Fell In Love With The Northwest, and thus with God all over again! Thank you! You helped save my relationship with my Father, My Shepherd, My Savior, My Bridegroom, my Friend, and you need to know that. I love you all!