Virga
Me (Looking at sky.): What is it again that you call that kind of rain that falls from the cloud but doesn’t make it to the ground? You know, when it evaporates halfway down?
Dennis: Vega?
Me (Frowning): Nope. I think it’s verde.
Dennis (Shaking head): Nah, I think that means green in Spanish. Or vegetable or something.
Me (sighing): I don’t know. Vengas?
(Dennis and I stare at the sky in silence for a while.)
Me: Hmmmm. Velare?
Dennis (in a rush of enthusiasm): I know! Virga!
Me: Oh, yeah! Virga. (Rolling word around on tongue.) That's it. Now why can’t we ever remember that one?
Dennis: I have no idea.
Me: But we have this same exact conversation every year at this time... (meaningful pause) We've been married a long time.
Dennis: Yep.
We gape up at the amaranthine sky from our dusty piece of earth the color of old Ovaltine. The dirt gets in my nose when the wind blows. Sticks to my lip-gloss like a gritty kiss. Whirls across the dry lot in a dirt devil, making the horses skittery.
Clouds gather above. Filled with thunder. Burgeoning with rain. But too fickle to shed one drop on us.
Like that European dressage rider who came to The Santa Fe Horse Park for a demo years ago. As the aristocrat drifted past me on her Warmblood in the parking lot, I found myself smiling at her, exclaiming, “What a beautiful horse!” To which the dressage queen poked her nose into the air and rode her glitterati gelding right past me. One of my more enlightened moments, I had to bite my tongue hard to keep from tossing after her, "Hey snooty, I have an Andalusian in my barn! You know? The Horse of Kings?"
Like my mom’s grandma who, she tells me, used to show up at their poor house (where there was usually just enough to eat, and very few treats) when my mom was a little girl with a big old bag of hard candy secreted away in her purse. And kept every piece for herself. To hear my mom tell it, that old woman sat on their living room couch and chewed the dime store confections one-by-one, right in front of her and her youngest brother Bud with all the gusto of a gray nag chomp-chomp-chomping a sugar cube between her big yellow teeth.
Like mean old Mr. S., our decrepit neighbor who’d lost one of his legs in a tractor accident, whose dog was perpetually chained, and whom my little sister and I were convinced had been a Nazi (as he loved to regale us with WWII stories). When I was a kid, he told me in his thick German accent that if I could catch one of the kittens in his falling-down wreck of a barn, I could have it. (I figured he drowned all kittens in his farm pond, because that's what his meek wife told me, so it was my duty to save them.) But when I returned with gray kitten in hand, reminding Mr. S., Remember, you told me I could have one?, he laughed, leaning back on the seat of the riding lawn mower that had served as his legs for the last 15 years, and stated with a perfectly straight face, colorless eyes glinting in merriment, “Well, I never told you that.”
Science question solved for the day, Dennis and I look at each other. Shrug our shoulders. Take turns shouting at the clouds, “Come on, rain! RAIN!”
(I’m reading a cool science fiction/fantasy book
Suddenly, a fat raindrop plops down into the dust. Then another. And another. And another. We watch the horses in the pasture buck and run and snort with excitement until a silver curtain of water is showering down upon all of us.
Like my grandma J.’s resplendent sterling hair, cascading all the way down her back. Loosed from two French braids coiled around and around and around at the base of her head and usually secured with pins, the silky stuff barely touched the ground. As a kid, I ran a brush through it at least a hundred times while she sat in front of me in her homemade cotton duster in a dining room chair in her front yard while the Oklahoma twilight effloresced with lightning bugs. Afterwards we ate all of the half-melted ice cream she’d just bought in town because her old Frigidaire never did work worth a damn, it was way too hot for sleeping, even with the box fans, and there was no rain anywhere on the horizon.
