After Rain

A tourist of DC I am no longer, that’s for sure.

I’m amazed at the time that has passed.

When the day was over today, sometime after 6, I ambled slowly to the metro, just kind of starkly amazed for a few moments by how different life has become – this November compared to the last.

On the ride home I read from a book of short stories my Uncle John had given me for Christmas by a writer named William Trevor – I’ve been consumed for about a week.

They’re all so disparate, but here’s one example: there’s a woman in her mid-40s who has reconciled her husband’s cheating as “his due,” since she never bore him children. She prepares his dinner each night through a haze of gin, only to pass out before she gets done cutting the fat off the chicken, or prepping the pork chops. He inevitably comes home to the site of her passed out on the floor, carries her up to their room, and they sleep in separate beds.

She then wakes each morning (we’re given to feel this is a recurring, long, drawn out cycle) groggy, only to realize that the her resignation has continued unabated.

Cheery, huh? But that’s the kind of stories they are. Each is starkly different from the others, all unkempt and unseemly stories about conflict and love and loss and gritty windows into personal moments – yet somehow it’s refreshing, not disheartening. It’s less canned somehow. Less processed.

Like think: what sorts of hopes must have been killed, what kind of daily reckonings and regular disappointments and feelings of duty lead them both to ignore the twin elephants in the room, sitting on their life? His cheating and her ensuing alcoholism have made a misery of what could have been marriage.

The collection of stories is called “After Rain.” The story of that title tells of a woman recovering from the end of an affair at a resort she’d visited with her parents as a child.

She realizes, stepping out of an old church she’s visited … just after a rain … that she’s been cheating her sense of love and duty and relationship with each half-started romance. Realizes instantly, in a sharp, deep, no-questions-about-it way. Realizes it after the rain, when the heat of the day has been soothed away and things are cool and washed and shimmering. When smells are fresh and life is fresh. Trevor’s description is powerful in a subtle way I can’t explain … we all know what it looks like after rain. We all know what it feels like … though we probably all ignore it most of the time.

But do we ever really acknowledge how our setting sometimes spurs us to think and to come to realizations?

Tonight it rained, and I came up from the metro just after it.

I thought of the story as I walked up the hill – thought of the way the author described the newness of things after rain … and formulated my own opinions as I walked.

After rain tonight it was cool, misty – and quiet. There was no one out on the walk back except a few people saying goodnight outside the apartment building across the way, and a driver with his cab jacked up on the side of the road, replacing a tire.

I reached my apartment having felt a peace and endearment for my situation I hadn’t felt before. I say situation because I think everybody’s got their “situation” – some lifestyle or set of circumstances that are either agreeable to them or full of parts and pieces they’d rather change.

I realized that a growing tide of exceptions, “settling,” small disappointments and an extreme lack of self-confidence have held me back for too long. Yet in spite of this, I’m OK. I am, perhaps, in a better situation than I realize. For all my fixed insistence that I’ve been betraying my innermost beliefs, I know deep down that isn’t true.

After tonight’s rain I realized that it’s time for action and planning to shape my future, and nothing else. Don’t they say sometimes our callings are shaped in the valleys of our lives … during the storm and confusion?


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Here's a link to Trevor if you're interested.