I’ve always loved rainy days. Especially when I could just hang out and listen to it or watch it fall. I especially liked when it would hit one of the metal awnings around my childhood home…pinging and slapping the metal in a rhythmic sound that always had a calming affect on me.

I’m not a huge fan of lightening though. Storms in southern Louisiana can get pretty intense and the lightening was almost always followed by the crashing, booming  rolls of thunder that would drive me under the covers when it happened in the middle of the night. 

But then there were those times when there would be a light rainfall and my mother would let me go outside to play in it. Donning galoshes and a raincoat,  I would dance in the rain…not a care in the world…and create streams in the mud where leaves with stick sails would travel to another world in my mind.

If I was really lucky, the water would collect in the deep ditch in our front yard. My sister and I would then take a thrown away refrigerator size cardboard box confiscated from the local hardware store dumpster and cut it open to create a homemade slippy slide leading from our front yard into the pond created in that ditch.

It didn’t matter we were poor and didn’t have a real pool. It didn’t matter that the water wasn’t crystal clear surrounded by white, sandy beaches.

In my mind, I was diving into a blue lagoon on some deserted tropical island and having the time of my life! My mother didn’t choose the life of poverty her children were born into, but she did allow us the freedom to use our creativity to have a little fun on a rainy day…

 

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***COMING MARCH 20, 2020!***

 

Book three of the HISTORY’S MYSTERIES series, Hunting Gris-Gris, is scheduled to be released this spring, just in time for Easter!