Or so the song goes.  Most people aren’t happy when it rains though.  It makes life harder.  Commuting is more difficult and potentially more dangerous.  (And I commute by bike, so multiply the difficulty and danger by 100x.)  Getting wet in work clothes is yucky, probably no matter what your job (unless your job involved getting wet), because you know you cannot change to dry clothes until the end of the day when you get home.  If you have a professional job, your shoes are unlikely to handle puddles well.  On the weekend, it spoils whatever fun you had planned.

But as a kid, rain was fun.  It rarely stopped any of our outside play.  We didn’t mind getting soaking wet or muddy, and maybe we even especially liked it.  At various times in my childhood, my brother and I built shelters/hideaways/forts.  Rainy days were awesome because we could “hardness test” our construction.  One of our more complicated efforts was in the woods near our house- a buffer between the highway and our community.  We built our shelter into the hill.  The roof was made of branches, stolen industrial strength garbage bags, and leaves.  Our goal was that our hideout should be completely camouflaged so we used lots of leaves on the roof.   We had no idea what we were doing, but I seem to recall doing “water-proofing” with stolen bacon grease.   I don’t know why we weren’t eaten by rabid raccoon or rats drawn to the yummy bacon smell, but somehow we never saw large vermin.  (There were bugs of course, and probably small snakes, but that was the default for the woods- I don’t remember anything specific infesting our fort.)   Since the shelter/fort/whatever was dug in to the hill, dampness came up from the ground as well, and we had few technical skills to deal with that.  Maybe we sat on garbage bags?  Needless to say, our shelter was not the driest place during storms.  Yet we loved it, and were super-impressed with our construction skills.  We spent many rainy days in our pit of mud with raindrops filtering through the leaves of our roof to drip on us.  And we were happy.

It is now pouring rain.  I’m sitting on my balcony and watching the rain pour.  I’m assessing the odds that I will get scolded by the condo association if I go out and play in the rain and come back in the building muddy and wet.  I’m thinking about what my neighbors would say if we met in the elevator, and I was soaking wet and had no rain gear.  As a woman, I’m wondering what type of reaction I’ll get when my entire outfit it soaking wet and plastered to my body.  I’m thinking about what I could wear that wouldn’t be indecent soaked.  I’m watching the lightening and wondering about the dangers.

I’m wondering, even if I ignore all this, would it even still be fun?