The wet weather box

A friend told me recently, as the two of us in the front of my car waiting for a shower to pass, that at her primary school there was a thing called the Wet Weather Box. The wet weather box was so fun that she now realises even the sight of it must have caused serotonin to shoot through her bloodstream. The release of the box from the teacher’s cupboard was a theatrical summoning of the weather Gods triggered when the teacher ting-tinged a triangle. By way of answer, the pitter patter of rain was replicated by small fingers on desks, which in turn crescendoed into the thundering downpour of palms on wood and feet stomping. The teacher, muttering something about the turn in the weather, would go to the cupboard but change her mind at the last second. Only when the thundering rain was at an absolute peak would she get the box and then: revered silence. Discussing it with me, decades later, as rain hurled itself at the windscreen and a slow fog spread across it like a map, her face lit up. There were games in the Wet Weather Box that you’d forgotten existed, and costumes, and craft activities that involved twinkly things and fluffy things, and the rain would belt down and the kids would play with a kind of mad intensity never replicated at any other times.

Her story reminded me of my own experience of wet weather in primary school. During electrical storms, our class used to eat lunch inside. On those days, our lunches spread out before us, our teacher would read us poetry, and stories, and we would (remarkably, in retrospect) listen in rapt attention as the rain drummed down on the flat tin roof. To this day, when I’m eating a salad sandwich, if it smells just right, it’s rain and poetry that comes to mind. T. S. Eliot. Roger McGeogh. Edgar Allan Poe. Once, during an electrical storm (probably it was more than once because I remember the poem almost word for word) our teacher read us The Highwayman, the rain roaring, the sky flashing shocking sheets of light. I was riveted, horrified, sandwich mid-air, tingling in anticipation as Bess, the landlord’s daughter, met her inevitable fate. I learned, when I studied poetry as an undergrad, about rhyme and meter and how how it mimicked the sound of the horse hooves approaching the inn door, but I didn’t really. I learned it on a wet weather day in primary school.

But usually, when it rains now, I calculate how not to let it ruin my plans. A woman walked past my three-year-old the other day, who was demonstrating the joys of enthusiastic puddle-leaping, squealing with joy. “Oh to be a kid again”, she said to me, grinnning as she hurried off.

This is a Public Service Announcement: you’re a kid again. Enjoy the wet weather. You don’t have to slow down completely. Just pause for a moment. Sink yourself into the drama of it.

Enjoy the way rivers form. Tiny rivers, filing the leaves into organised piles, washing the world anew.

Enjoy the drama of the sky. How sometimes one side of the sky looks blue and picturesque and the other side looks like it’s been punched in the face.

Enjoy that strange mathematics we all half remember about the timing of lightening and thunder as a means of measuring how the storm is traveling.

Enjoy how the clouds that look like they’re wafting gently are hurtling along at an incredible speed, and the rain that thunders down on the roof is actually nothing much.

Enjoy dragon breath.

Enjoy warm socks.

Enjoy the mist coming off the earth in the morning in the country and off the asphalt in the city after it rains.

Enjoy people and their idiotic wet weather responses - as if trotting while holding a napkin over your head is going to result in significant levels of dryness.

Or the tragic inadequacy of the umbrella. How can we claim to be a developed species when our response to a downpour is to hold a small damp flag of material up over our head on a bunch of wires?

Enjoy the sound of it.

Enjoy the way it brings out the birds.

Enjoy the smell of the earth and the feeling of being warm and dry inside when you’ve escaped it.

Wet weather. Not just an inconvenience. Jump in a puddle.

This has been a Public Service Announcement.