Day 236

The sound of rainfall should lull me to sleep, like one of the preset button choices on a white noise sleep machine, but lately that hasn't been the case.

My junior-high drama teacher was a character. She taught us how to do eye-liner so eyes "popped" from stage. She taught us how to kiss on stage without actual lip contact. She taught us what Stage Left meant, and how to properly Stage Whisper, and the importance of projecting one's voice to the hard-of-hearing patrons sitting in the very back row of the theater. She managed to teach us these things while controlling a classroom of very rowdy teenagers. She didn't "put up with our guff" or let us "pull one over on her."

One of the other things she routinely said was "You are up in the night if you think . . ."   She insinuated being up in the night meant we were crazy. I can see where teaching junior high students would cause a teacher to find alternative ways of calling students "crazy".  It's understandable. 

It has been raining at night this week, and when it rains hard, the rain plays the cute metal decor on my patio like a gargantuan steel pan drum, tapping out an intense and complicated Caribbean percussion in rhythms that force my ears to listen carefully, as if Mother Nature is disguising an organized beat somewhere within her wild downpour. My ears search the drip drip drops for a pattern. Any pattern.

Listening, I find myself up in the night, decoding the hidden messages in the torrent, and thinking about my junior-high drama teacher. She was known to take unruly students by the ear and lead them to the office, saying "That's enough out of you." I loved her for that, because I was the bookish girl on a side row, trying to learn what she had to teach.

I wonder what she'd have to say about these rainstorms. Possibly, "Can it, Mother Nature. That's enough out of you for one night." Mother Nature would listen, as we all listened to Mrs. Sanderson, and then this up-in-the-night ado could quietly fade to black. End scene. Exit Stage Left. Back to bed.