The storm

It is late and I should be sleeping.  This memory, this beautiful memory haunts me.  The steamy summer storm raged outside.  We had the windows to the porch open wide to let in the thunder.  We loved storms. The angrier the better.  We sat on the couch, your hands on my belly, waiting to feel the life inside reach out to you.  Only a few more weeks.  I was terrified, and you were impatient to meet your first.  The sirens went off.  The sound sending us outside in mad anticipation.  I couldn't get my body to leave the porch.  I stood there in bare feet.  The rain whipping about me, the wind pulling at my sundress, as you ran to the street to see if it would come.  The rain falling so hard I could barely see you just a few dozen feet away.

I wanted to go too.  I was paralyzed by my biology.  Then I heard it.  The familiar freight train roar growing louder that meant it WAS coming.  And I yelled to you, "we have to go to the basement" but you didn't hear me. I could barely see you. Panick set in. I had only experienced curiosity, wonderment, and excitement in times like these, but now I wanted to run away from the noise.  Then came the so-loud snapping of the oaks in the park on the other side of the narrow street. I yelled a yell that hurt, "we have to go inside, right now!" And you yelled back, "no, I won't, but you probably should".  I thought I might puke.  I could feel the fingers of it clawing at the inside of my raw throat.  

Some readers will judge me for what I said next.  My wet sun dress clung to my swollen belly, as I screamed, "I am NOT raising this baby without you!  If you won't go in neither will I."  So I stood on that porch drenched, being beaten by pellets of rain, that might have stung if I could have felt them, as the sound of trees snapping traveled down the park, now made invisible by the rain. The sound traveled parallel to our row of houses and into the distance.  The park lost over 50 trees that day, but I learned something about us.

I would rather stand with you in any storm then stand alone in safety.  I would rather enter the fray with you than be without you.  This life, this military life, of forced separations is hard because you enter storms and I cannot come.  I have to stay behind.  But even so, know that when you think you don't see me there standing next to you in the rain, I am.  I am definitely there.  I made up my mind on a hot steamy summer day long ago that no matter what, I was weathering every storm WITH you.