Palmtree Contemplations

When the rain begins I leave my Philosophy reading behind with a squeal, run down the twisting Music Department hallways, and stand, breathless, watching the downpour from just inside the department's glass doors. Outside, the world is being washed clean by the deluge. The deep black pavement of the parking lot is covered in a sheen of water. I can see currents forming on top of it. Raindrops bounce and slide down the sides of the glass enclosure surrounding me, and I am lost remembering... I used to watch the river currents bending and curving in the rain outside my window. During most rainstorms, I was out in the river with everyone else who had any sense, feeling the currents and rain up close. Swimming in a rainstorm was wet, cold, and electrifying. The world was grey, black, and fierce, hitting us with full force from all directions. Everything became the ever present now: this feeling of water smashing into your face, the giggle you let out when thunder peals above you, and

"Show me, O LORD, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life." Psalm 39:4               When I was young, my siblings and I used to play hide-and-seek in a small California cemetery. Those were bright, summery days filled with laughter and frantic chases amongst headstones and memorials. To me, the cemetery was my family's private playground. When my parents did language study in Manaus, there was one particular bus route that ran right beside the cemetery. It seemed a place of magic and mystery to me, with its white, sloping, walls that glittered with broken, green and brown glass. I wanted a key to those barred blue gates. I always leaned forward in my seat, my eyes memorizing the shapes and peeling colors of the many crosses and monuments to the Holy Virgin. Years later, at college in Arkansas, the cemetery near my school has become my place of solitude. I will pace the rows of graves, call out quiet, sometimes silly greetin