Tag: rain

The Celery Dream

The story begins in a house. I know it’s mine, but it’s enormous.

I’m in the living room, which is probably two thousand square feet. Huge plate-glass windows line three sides. Rain is falling outside. Under one side of the windows, I have a stone wall with a rock garden, small hill, and waterfall. Several broad-leafed green plants are growing in the rock garden. Yes, this is in my living room.

Three cats reside there with me, and they’re running around. My wife lives there, too; I know (in the dream) that she’s in another part of the house. We also have a few visitors.

I’m dealing mostly with the cats, feeding them, playing with them, while glancing outside at the rain and chatting with my visitors. One of them (Bob) calls attention to some water he sees on the floor in another room.

After going and confirming that a small puddle is in the kitchen, I call out the news to my wife and then begin inspecting the kitchen, looking for leaks, until I’ve discovered where it seems to be entering. Well, I’ll need to take care of that, I announce while wondering about its severity.

Then, quick change, I’m looking for the cats. One, a short-haired orange and white tabby, has gone outside. I go out after him. My yard is enormous. One side borders a sidewalk alongside a street. The cat is enjoying my efforts to capture him, capering across the green grass and evading me with mischievous ease. Then the cat stops in the game to look up the sidewalk. Following his look, I see a large orange and white cat (it looks like a Maine Coon Cat) coming down the sidewalk, tail up. The cat looks like a large, long-haired version of my cat. I comment on that to someone.

I’m back inside my house, but I’m gone down into the garage. Like other parts of the house, it’s huge, enough space for perhaps a dozen cars. None are there now. It’s spotless cement.

I’m preparing a fix. Although I knew what I was doing in the dream, I don’t know now what I was fixing, but I was planning to use celery. To fix whatever it was with the celery, I was using a chisel to break stalks of celery into small plugs. I had problems with some of the celery stalks, and then stopped because my visitors came down to find me, and I didn’t want them knowing what I was doing.

After I hid the celery and went to speak with them, the dream ended.

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Raining Color Dream

After thinking about dreams and posting today’s theme music (“Highway Star”, Deep Purple, 1972), I was fixing brekkie when a dream segment blasted into memory.

I was a child, maybe nine or ten, but could’ve younger, outside with many other children. Blue sky, sunshine, laughing, and game-playing established the background. We were having a great time.

I was heading toward a picnic table by tall pine trees when I heard others gasping. That caused me to look up. When I did, I discovered it was raining. No clouds were visible, but rain was falling.

A bold, shimmering rainbow formed. It seemed like it was right over our heads, so close and solid that we were trying to jump up and touch it. Then the rain became drops of falling color. The colors splashed over us, making us giddy with laughter. We discovered we could cup our hands and catch handfuls of color and pour them over ourselves and one another. Blues, purples, reds, yellows, oranges, and greens were pooling on the ground and streaming together into rainbows that flowed across the land.

Splashing and stomping in these flowing rainbows, we discovered that we could pick up the colored water and shape it like very wet and malleable clay.

The dream ended.

My heart rushes as I remember it.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Still raining.

Still walking in it.

Still fun — or pleasant — but a little less so than yesterday or the day before.

Smoke was rising from the hillside, leftover from the controlled burns in the watershed the other day. But I thought, yeah, maybe someone set fire to the rain.

So then I was thinking about Adele’s song, “Set Fire to the Rain” (2011), a powerful, powerful song about love, relationships, and re-birth. I (probably like many) enjoy her refrain:

But there’s a side to you that I never knew, never knew
All the things you’d say, they were never true, never true
And the games you’d play, you would always win, always win

h/t to MetroLyrics.com

That’s what you find as you go through relationships, the pieces that aren’t revealed, whose revelations (when found) fundamentally shift your thoughts (and feelings) about the other, leaving you to ask yourself (as you search), what do I do?

Sometimes you walk on, sometimes you stay, but the relationship has been changed.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

It was a rainy night so I started humming the Eurythmics song, “Here Comes the Rain Again” (1983). So sorry they broke up but bands have their own cycles of life, death, and creation.

I enjoyed the construction and sensibilities of these lines in the song:

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion

I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you?

h/t Metrolyrics.com

I happened to be walking in the open wind and remembering walking in the rain, alone, something that I enjoy. A sharp cold wind was knifing across my cheeks, and I breathed it all in with joy, satisfaction, and nostalgia. Then the clouds broke and there was that brill full moon, coming on like a spotlight. With clouds skipping past the moon’s surface and the wind quickening, it seemed like the moon sprinted across the sky, a trick of the mind. Clouds closed over the moon, and the rain came again.

Is it raining with you?

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Monday’s Theme Music

A power ballad is today’s choice, slipping into the stream as I awoke to the sound of rain in the night and thought, November rain.

Sometimes you need some time on your own.

Here’s the Guns n’ Roses song, “November Rain”, 1992.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Rain arrived yesterday afternoon, bringing its evocative smells and sounds. Late in the evening, I slipped out onto the covered back patio with a pair of my feline companions to enjoy the sounds. Steady but soft, the rain imbued the night with tranquility.

Out of my thoughts and into my stream came an old Eddie Rabbit song, “I Love A Rainy Night” (1980). I came to know the song through my wife. We were living in Texas then, assigned to Randolph AFB outside of Universal City, not far from San Antonio. She enjoyed the song and frequently played it on our stereo cassette player. Hearing the song takes me right back to that year and place.

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Dark and Stormy Dreams

Last night was a serene, cool night but wild storms were on the dream menu.

One dream began with me outside, on a worn but mostly green hillock. I think I was in a park, as copses of trees grew around open spaces and statues.

Although bright afternoon blue associated with summer was overhead, dark clouds gathered, moving in like they were answering a whistle. People, including me, were anxious. Talking persisted all around me. All were strangers, though, and I couldn’t understand exactly what they were saying.

I was thinking that I needed to get inside and safe before the storm broke but I was worried about my friends and family. I was also puzzled; I didn’t see any of them but I was certain that they’d been with me. Looking for them, I became frantic as the temperature dropped and the clouds darkened into a fresh charcoal briquette darkness.

I started walking fast. Others were running. Growing drumming like a drum and bugle corp was approaching announced the storm’s beginning. Lightning licked from north to south in long and spectacular prolonged, brilliant slashes, captivating and frightening me. With a sharp suddenness, a wind howled through, knocking me over. After rolling and tumbling, I struggled against the wind to stand.

I heard rain hammering the ground. A deluge like a fire hose was being sprayed began. As lightning struck trees and thunder shook the air and explosions boomed, the wind tossed and slammed me, eventually shoving me against a tree trunk. Arching with pain, soaked and cold, I managed to hang onto the tree as the wind tore my clothes and hair. I was shivering with cold and fear.

With lightning striking everywhere around me, I thought, I can’t stay here. I need to get out of here. Nothing was visible for the heavy rain and dim light. I didn’t know where to go. Desperate for movement, I struck out blindly.

The wind drove me forward and then lifted me. I tried grabbing the ground but the wind took me on a ride toward the trees. As I spun and spotted the looming branches, I was sure that I was going to be impaled and killed, but the wind carried me above the trees.

In seconds, I was out of the storm. The wind calmed but still carried me. Feeling its energy dissipating, I was sure I was going to plummet to the Earth and die. As I looked down to see where I’d land and  what I could do about it, I realized that I was over the storm, and flying above it. 

A cat hissing awoke me then. Scrambling out of bed to confront the situation, I saw that Boo was telling Papi that he couldn’t come in through the pet door. Boo ran out of the room and down the hall and Papi sallied in. Since I was up, I went to pee and think about the vivid dream, as my mind stayed wrapped in it.

It’d been a shockingly vivid dream.

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The Rain Today

Ashland’s rain today reminded me of the Philippines. I was stationed with the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, part of 13th Air Force and Pacific Air Forces, at Clark Air Base in the Philippines in the mid 1970s. It was my first overseas duty assignment. Being low in rank, it was a short tour – fifteen months – and my wife was not allowed to be there with me.

I had a lot of free time outside of my shifts. I used to run almost every day, then, in addition to my walking. I typically ran three to five miles a day. The weather never felt cold to me. Sometimes, the rain felt warm.

I was comparing my Philippines memory of rain to our Ashland rain today, trying to think of how I would describe this rain. This isn’t the monsoon sort of downpours that I knew in the Philippines, South Carolina, West Virginia, Okinawa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Germany, or England. We rarely seem to receive that sort of rain here. Nor is it the milder, lighter rain, like a shower or light rain that I often experienced in Half Moon Bay. This is just…rain.

Our athletic attire is a lot better in 2019 than it was in 1976. Back then, all my athletic clothing was cotton. When I was running in the rain, it’d get sopping wet, heavy, and start sagging and falling off. My socks then were athletic top socks that came up to my knees. They would slide down to my ankles. I wore Adidas running shoes, and head and wrist sweat bands. The wrist bands would start sliding down over my hands, and the head band would drop over my eyes.

I’d bought the bands for playing racquetball, and they were most definitely required in a a racquetball court’s humid confines. They didn’t seem to have air-con nor fans back then.

I used to run the one and a half miles between my barracks and the gym, play racquetball, and not infrequently run home. I’ve always been optimistic, sometimes stupidly so. I once saw it starting to rain in the Philippines and took off running for the gym to play racquetball. I was soaked when I arrived. Water pooled around me. There was no way I would be playing racquetball in those clothes. I had no choice but to run back to the barracks, holding up my short blue Adidas shorts with one hand as I ran.

Ah, good times.

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