Rain on the window.
I was reminded earlier this week of the Ray Bradbury short story, There Will Come Soft Rains, for reasons I won’t get into here.
It’s one of my favorite short stories ever. It concludes with a poem of the same name, and the coincidence of today’s misty rain is causing that poem to run a continuous loop in my mind:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
-Sara Teasdale
Depressing, but pretty. Sort of like rain on chilly fall days.
I suppose there are good things to be said for soft autumn rains:
Rain on the grass means no mowing the lawn today.
Rain on the leaves means no raking (hooray!).
Rain on the clothesline means a day off from laundry.
What to do with a day inside?
The kids are busying themselves with painting.
I am eyeing the cheese pumpkin.
Pumpkin whoopie pies, to be sure, but what else?
Pumpkin soup? Pumpkin muffins? Pumpkin carrot cake? I’ve not decided yet.
Later, a cup of tea and Breaking Dawn, all 754 pages of it.
Maybe I’ll watch my latest Netflix arrival, North by Northwest, while snuggled under the covers.
Sounds like a good day to me.
What do you like to do on a rainy Saturday?
P.S. I looked up There Will Come Soft Rains on Amazon, and the collection of short stories I own that includes it is available for a penny! This is seriously a great gift for middle-school aged readers, or for yourself.
The collection is called Twenty-One Great Stories (Mentor)
