In third grade we were allowed to take books from the library of our grammar school once a week. The library had been a janitor’s closet. It had one window, metal shelves, a few hundred books. As with many young memories that have been riveted into us, that first view of it is a 3 or 4 second video of south-facing light flooding in from the big window and of the sonorous notes of Sister’s voice. I remember the first book but nothing of how I came to choose it. This is the first line from a small book with a dark cover.
“It rained and rained for thousands of years.”
I saw it as I can still see it, and with that sentence, I know something shifted in me that has never shifted back, but I cannot tell you why that sentence has refused to disappear for 64 years.
I often think of that endless rain and of rivers becoming seas, of that recognition of ancient turbulence and drama. Maybe for the first time, I understood the delicious bifurcation of a life, how to be within and without, how I could be scrambling for my life toward ever higher ground while seeing shadows on a windowsill painted white in a dusty, cramped room in a small school on a quiet street.
