Rainsummer

I love the hour before an evening summer storm. By seven o’clock, the long sunset has begun anyway, and the cloudveil merely adds to the darkening. It gives you the feeling of being a kid, staying out later than you were allowed tonight, because something special is going to happen. The air smells like a woman cooling off from exercise. You tilt your head upward and wince because you can expect at any moment the first pebbles of water to plummet down from three thousand feet above at tremendous speed and plink you in the eye. And once you’ve seen the drop growing bigger it’s too late to avoid it.

I remember in the summertime as kids, my sisters and I would go out into the driveway, or sometimes just out on the front porch and watch the leadgray curtain approach our neighborhood. Linen shorts and t-shirts, maybe thong sandals too, but most likely bare feet. We’d skip-toe out to the grass and roll around, daring the storm to come. The bugs had all fled, even the bees that gave us so much fear. It was just the prickly soft grass and its the hard dirt scalp, and we’d press our faces into it making our noses itch and run. Dane Espegaard was across the cul-de-sac, and if he and his brother Ryan appeared, and their big cat Abraham, I’d go to meet them in the middle, carefully picking my feet up to avoid a shard of brown glass or a larger tooth of gravel. Abraham would stalk the boulevards on the perimeter never looking at us.

The rain came and it was always too short. I loved the rain because something was happening. When you’re a kid, you get impatient for that. When you’re an adult, you just want someone to share the moment with.

The rain, the rain, the rain, fat and cold and riding a cool front. Abraham trotted for cover under the eaves in the bushes at the tall gray Barnell house. Sometimes we’d play in it and get our hair and cotton t-shirts plastered to our skinny little bodies. But I also liked to abstain, upstairs on my bed in the corner, reading the Hardy Boys in the gray light in the shadows, or else downstairs folded over the back of the couch, looking out of the front windows as the world got drenched. Never much liked it after the rain was done—everything was wet and muddy, grass clippings clung to your ankles, the late summer sun came back again and nothing was special anymore. No, I liked the rain, when the world was different and you had the sense that someday you’d share this with someone.

While Jesus Waits in Hell

Flip flops slap across the freshly mopped marble floor of the new Cathedral. Outside, it is the first hot day of the year in Houston. Inside, the shade is cool—people in t-shirts enjoy the feeling of their own bare arms, swinging free, uninhibited, putting flowers around the statutes of the saints, around the Roman altar, the brass-plated tabernacle, still open and empty, but without so much of the horror. We committed murder yesterday, but that was yesterday. We’re different now. Time has passed—last night, this morning—and things are different now.

The candles are still not out; all the sticks stand empty. The rose quartz basins of holy water at the entryways are still padded dry; nothing for the people in t-shirts to bless themselves with as they slip in and out through the heavy doors, going for another load of clean linens, reserved pew placards, boxes of new candles, more flowers—lilies, petunias, forsythias, hydrangeas—nothing to bless themselves with except their own hands. The baptismal font, though, has been refilling since early this morning and its granite lips are now brimming over again. The sound of the fountain’s trickle, running out of the mouth, down the chin, down the neck, shoulders, spreading over the torso of the interior column, soothes the anxious brows of the t-shirted people as they make the preparations. Tonight, the font will be the co-Star; right now it supervises.

Across town at a supermarket, someone has just purchased the last lamb roast from the butcher. Raise the interior temperature to 160º, says the meat man. It is high strawberry season in Texas, and you can purchase a whole box of them for 99¢ (limit of four). In dairy, the sample lady is giving out brochures and little medicine cups of ultra-active yogurt culture drink—new from Japan, she says, sold in little five-pack bottles, one for each day’s lunch. At the front of the store, Janelle is slicing samples of bunny cakes patted with coconut flakes to give Peter Cottontail the impression of fur.

Further out to the west, rollerbladers enter Memorial Park from the bayou mo-pac trail. The foliage is lush and green in many places now, but the leaves still droop limply, like a stilt-legged colt not yet used to its own weight. Wick-away mesh shirts and sports bras and a Big Brother throwing routes to a Nike-ed kid over a broad-blade grassy patch where the ground warm and damp with life. A man and wife push their rubber tire stroller under the shade of an oak and pull out foil wrapped sandwiches.

Houston bakes. It is Saturday, this Saturday, this one, holy Saturday. Inside the Cathedral, flip flopped feet slap the floor on their way out of the sanctuary—whap, whap, whap, whap—to return again soon in full-toed leather.