Some Weather Arrives With Memories

It started raining, so naturally, I went outside.

I love sitting on the porch in the rain. I know I’m a broken record, but there’s nothing quite like raindrops hitting a metal roof.

There’s something about being tucked under the porch with the rain falling all around you. Little waterfalls forming in the grooves as the rain slides off the roof. Sheltered. Cozy. Like the whole world gets smaller for a little while.

Except this time, when I stepped outside, there were no dark clouds. No thunder rolling in.

The sun was shining.

A sun shower.

And somewhere between the rain and the sunshine, I heard my granny.

“Well, the devil’s beatin’ his wife again.”

Not really, of course.

Just one of those memories that sounds so much like a voice you almost turn toward it.

She used to say it whenever the rain fell while the sun was shining. She’d shake her head and smile.

I had no idea what she meant.

I’d smile anyway.

And all these years later, standing on my own porch, I did it again.

I smiled.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, Granny decided to stay awhile.

Over the next few days, she kept turning up.

Songs I hadn’t thought about in years came back to me. Silly little songs she used to sing that I somehow still knew pieces of.

Then the stories came.

Her sayings. Her gardens. Things I hadn’t known I’d remembered at all.

I swear, of all things, I could smell her quilts. Not even her, just her quilts.

Cedar chest and mothballs.

Standard-issue granny perfume, I think.

And with each memory came another, as though they’d all been tucked away together somewhere, waiting for one of them to be found.

One of those stories was the banana.

Granny was a little girl, traveling across Texas by covered wagon, when someone gave them a banana.

I was so young when she told me the story that I don’t remember all those precious details now. Who gave it to them. Where they were. What Granny thought when she first saw it.

But the end always stayed.

They had never seen a banana before, apparently, and somehow the most logical thing to do was to eat the “skin” and throw away the seed.

So they did.

And she’d laugh and say how for years she didn’t understand why anyone liked bananas.

“Wasn’t until my Barney that I learned the right way.”

My Barney.

I love how she called him that.

Of all the details time could have let me keep, I’m awfully glad it left me that one.

You don’t know which ordinary moments will become precious while you’re still living them.

Maybe that’s why these memories felt so different when they came back.

Softer. Kinder. Quieter.

And somehow so much fuller.

I couldn’t give you a careful chronology of Granny’s life. There are questions I wish I had known enough to ask when there was still someone here to answer them.

What I have instead are fragments.

The skin of a banana.

A silly song.

A garden.

Cedar and mothballs.

“My Barney.”

And a ridiculous old saying carried back to me while rain fell through sunshine.

Maybe that’s how we keep the people we love.

Not whole.

Just in these small, ordinary pieces that somehow survive the years.

Waiting for a sun shower to bring them home.