Some people always seem to know when rain is coming. Some smell it; others feel it in their bones, as if the gift of meteorological foresight is meant to be some sort of consolation for bearing the burden of a bad knee or hip. But my mother, who has this gift, does neither. Rather, she hears the rain before it arrives. She says that rain makes a sound; prides herself on knowing its familiar rustle by heart.
When I was a child, she wanted me to hear it, too. “Listen,” she would instruct me, her hand on the small of my back directing me to the open window. We’d sit, listening to a cacophony of winds that meant nothing to me. “You can always tell when it’s going to rain if you listen.”
I would ask how, and she always had the same answer.
“Rain sings a song, Lucy,” she said, glancing to the horizon with a softly faraway look. “Hear that?” She’d pause, and I’d strain my ear to listen, but I’d never hear anything but meaningless weather-sounds, incomprehensible to me. But she didn’t seem to care; she’d go on. “Hear how the wind moves through the trees? That’s how it tells us it’s coming to visit.”
“But can’t we just look up at the sky and see that it’s going to rain?” I asked once, puzzled, when I was seven. It made sense to me, that way. I couldn’t foresee a storm the way my mother could, but once the clouds settled in for the hour, I knew what was coming. They were like workers settling heavily into couch cushions at the end of an interminable workday, and I knew the sighs of relief and discontent they’d let out in the form of raindrops were coming. But that was never enough for my mother.
“Of course we can, Lucy,” she told me with a furtive little glance that told me she was surprised at my way of seeing the world. “But we miss so much when we can only see what’s in front of us.” She said it with a sad little sigh, nesting her chin in her open palm with her forehead pressed to the window. “Listen to the wind - it plays the trees like an instrument.”
“What?” my mother’s way of thinking never made sense to me, but right then she seemed even more cryptic than I’d come to expect in my seven years of life. Once, at fifteen, I remembered that exchange, and I thought perhaps she’d been trying to draw a parallel between my own life and her way of seeing it - referring to music to explain something I didn’t understand when the black-and-white simplicity of a piano’s keys had always, always made sense to me. But I was young. That was perhaps a failing of my mother’s - her brilliance, the way her mind constantly leapt to make connections, its ability to spin words and thoughts and feelings and ideas into poetry - and the way she tried to parent me as if I shared it.
I never have, and I see it over again every time I think of that moment. My brain was binary, stark; brilliant in its way, but never in hers. She never seemed to understand that - about me, about anyone. It must have been lonely in that palace of beautiful words and shimmering thoughts that few, if any, would ever want to hear, let alone understand in their ripe fullness the way she wanted them to. And I know now that she wanted me, her only daughter, to be the one to unlock the castle gate and take her thoughts into my arms and embrace them, when I was never ready. Would never be ready. My father wasn’t, her parents weren’t; she loved them, and they her, but did not connect, didn’t understand. She walked through life as if she had the gift of tongues and had been given no one with the gift of interpreting them.
“Listen,” she told me, more emphatic. “Hear it sing. The rain’s coming.”
She left the windowsill then, and I found her in her office hours later, a pale pink box next to her and photos and papers - the ephemera of her entire life, laid out on a teak desk that had never looked lonelier - spread out across the surface. The rain streaked down the windows.
I never told her that I saw her that night.