The rain came under a ledge of gray clouds. The mountains could not stop it. The Blue Ridge turned a foggy face to the deluge and earned their name in somber hues above us. We sat on the front porch of a restaurant in Abington, Virginia, right off Interstate 81. The establishment had once been an old farmhouse. A good porch is the best place to watch rain. It arrived in a gush of wind and the air turned liquid.
The first clap of thunder rattled the old panes and silenced the patrons. Drumming water imitated static on the roof. Rain sluiced from an ornate pipe and pushed across the gravel parking lot. Across the highway, the yellow glow of a Shell station reflected in aggregating puddles.
I remember a rain in Texas that cracked open the sky like ripping a mellon. On a porch in Grapevine, I watched drops fall like elephants crying. Even the cover could not protect me from the swirl of water and the aching noise from electrical disturbance above. Porches in Texas are less for rain watching than for sun avoiding.
The first full-tilt, frog-strangling, cow-peeing-on-a-flat-rock porch rain I remember happened on my grandparent’s sagging gallery on our farm. It was Sunday. My grandmother was cooking dinner. I was wearing my best church clothes: white button down shirt, checked tie, black pants, shiny shoes – freshly polished.
The porch jutted into the bare yard and protected a rusted horseshoe, hanging for luck over the front door. My grandfather and I sat on the warped swing he’d hung from the questionable roof with old chains that ached and whined. Everything about the old unpainted house was warped from the roof to the floor to the doors. Old dogs and a couple of chickens huddled under the slats below, hiding from the weather.
The clouds boiled, then clabbered and started spitting across the fields to the west. It was a rock-floater of a storm. Red clay splattered like bloody bullets stinging the ground. The violence above hypnotized me. It was total beauty and absolute fear and made me realize that sometimes they are hard to tell apart. No on spoke. We watched it respectfully, feeling the moist breeze, tasting the fecund rain on our tongues.
I turned to walk back into the house, but my foot slipped off the edge of the slick wood and I tumbled headlong into a foot-deep puddle dug by the deluge off the roof. One of my nice shoes came off and nearly knocked a chicken unconscious. The dogs barked at me as if I was a chunk of shrapnel falling from Sputnik.
I jumped up. Everything on me was brown. I looked like I had been dipped in lumpy chocolate. A word I had heard my grandfather use regularly burped out of me. That particular word was not supposed to be in my mouth to begin with, especially on Sunday. I was saved from a good whipping, however, by the gallons of mud in my pants. I was just too filthy to whip without splattering every Sunday dresser within 50 feet. The embarrassment was total. I stood with my head in a rivulet off the roof. It slowly used gravity and hydraulics to free me from most of the mud. The harder it rained, the more the flow, the cleaner I got.
The mud stained my white church shirt into an interesting pattern that seemed to fall into the social leanings of the 1960′s. It was as if I have been baptized in the mud hole and come out, not so much cleaner or dirtier, but hippier. Janis Joplin started sounding like a siren to my Southern ears. Jimmy Hendricks laid down one side of a song and the next night Duane Allman would twist it up a bottleneck. The chunky monkey sound of the Greatful Dead harmonies chugs in my ears. 1968 was coming, and I’d just stepped off the back porch and fallen right into it.
