It's Raining! And I have Mexican Icecream!
I just came in..
I saw drops on the skylights, but I didn't hear the ice cream vendor's bells. Luckily, I had left over rice flavored ice cream in the freezer, from one (maybe two..or three) weeks ago. So I make a mad dash down two flights of stairs for the freezer (tripped over two telephone cords and a plywood floor), and was releived to see that nothing was growing on the popsicle. I tried the backyard first, but found that I couldn't really smell the rain, just the honeysuckle with the rain, which while lovely, isn't what I needed. So I wandered closer to the house licking the ice cream, and saw my dad grilling hot links and corn in the garden. That grill has been in the same place between old tomato cages and the house for so long, weeds are starting to wind their way up its legs. It smells like smoke over there, it's comforting, precisely the opposite effect I need. The entire garden looks like a jungle in the rain, everything is blooming, and the passionflowers add the the exotic element which the lack of usually restricts it to looking like an overgrown english herb plot.
SO, I go to the front yard, where it turns out to be perfect. This rain is perfect. There's no threat of a storm, and still no threat of the rain stopping. It's light, but heavy enough to persuade most people to carry umbrellas.
Now this is important, for anyone who ever gets curious enough about this to try it. You have to find somewhere with older cement to dance around on while eating your ice cream. The newer, whiter cement won't work, it doesn't absorb the right amount of heat and doesn't repel enough water for the effect you want. And the grass nearly ruins the experience. Don't step in it. You have to do this barefoot. Dance around on the cement, try to breathe in while tasting the rice. Look at the brown specks in the white ice cream, and then down at the brown specks in the brownish grey cement, and then back at the brown specks in the ice cream again. At the quality of the clouds, and hte color of the sky. They all get mixed up, and become one sort of flavor that's cloudy, some combination of grainy and sinewy, blue, cream, brown, white, cold, and wet. So so satisfying.
Though this idea is probably not such a good one when you have a cold (milk in the ice cream and barefoot in the rain).
I went to Paperback's today too, and returned with two books about backpacking and one about how there are still 405,000 odd square miles with around 2 people per square mile in the continental united states.
I saw drops on the skylights, but I didn't hear the ice cream vendor's bells. Luckily, I had left over rice flavored ice cream in the freezer, from one (maybe two..or three) weeks ago. So I make a mad dash down two flights of stairs for the freezer (tripped over two telephone cords and a plywood floor), and was releived to see that nothing was growing on the popsicle. I tried the backyard first, but found that I couldn't really smell the rain, just the honeysuckle with the rain, which while lovely, isn't what I needed. So I wandered closer to the house licking the ice cream, and saw my dad grilling hot links and corn in the garden. That grill has been in the same place between old tomato cages and the house for so long, weeds are starting to wind their way up its legs. It smells like smoke over there, it's comforting, precisely the opposite effect I need. The entire garden looks like a jungle in the rain, everything is blooming, and the passionflowers add the the exotic element which the lack of usually restricts it to looking like an overgrown english herb plot.
SO, I go to the front yard, where it turns out to be perfect. This rain is perfect. There's no threat of a storm, and still no threat of the rain stopping. It's light, but heavy enough to persuade most people to carry umbrellas.
Now this is important, for anyone who ever gets curious enough about this to try it. You have to find somewhere with older cement to dance around on while eating your ice cream. The newer, whiter cement won't work, it doesn't absorb the right amount of heat and doesn't repel enough water for the effect you want. And the grass nearly ruins the experience. Don't step in it. You have to do this barefoot. Dance around on the cement, try to breathe in while tasting the rice. Look at the brown specks in the white ice cream, and then down at the brown specks in the brownish grey cement, and then back at the brown specks in the ice cream again. At the quality of the clouds, and hte color of the sky. They all get mixed up, and become one sort of flavor that's cloudy, some combination of grainy and sinewy, blue, cream, brown, white, cold, and wet. So so satisfying.
Though this idea is probably not such a good one when you have a cold (milk in the ice cream and barefoot in the rain).
I went to Paperback's today too, and returned with two books about backpacking and one about how there are still 405,000 odd square miles with around 2 people per square mile in the continental united states.