Sick and Sleepy Attempt at Analogy About Life, Water, Quilts and Other Unformed Thoughts
After twelve hours at work, finally home, walking only in a towel across the way to the neighbor’s house where there is a shower…and the rain comes, falling fast as bullets and penetrating my mind with each pock-mark landing on the skin. I walk slowly, lingering like an amphibian between the two houses with no particular concern for the sudden streams rushing around my feet along the path or the sogginess of my bath towel.
The first thing I feel is spring in the South – how it is always warm here and the rain doesn’t produce a chill in the bones or make me want hot chocolate. How the rain can be dry here, especially in the summer time and even when we get more than two inches in thirty minutes…
The second thing I feel is the heat of a flashback. October 1998 and I am standing in the driveway of The Writing House, where I lived for one semester my sophomore year. I stand in the rain for forty-five minutes before I can get in Robannie’s car and go, finally accepting it is real. Speeding for two hundred and twenty-five miles down the interstate, my heart cutting through the Columbia River gorge like fabric sheers through the silk terrain of the earth, and I am driving to my friend Isaac’s funeral…
Living like this makes each day turn into a quilt, one experience stitched to the next and always backed by other layers of fabric – moments from our pasts, projections for the future. And by nightfall one quilt square has been completed, sometimes yielding an immediate pattern or on other days lending itself to the greater whole that is yet unseen. And sometimes, all of it coming together at once – where suddenly we see the significance of one experience as it has been traced through our lives, like the sensation of rainwater landing on the skin.