Walking Home In The Rain

WALKING HOME IN THE RAIN / Richard Cecil Confused by new leaves on this street's tall trees, planted when the elms died in the fifties, I'm lost, a block from home, when I look up. I recognize low, milky-colored sky beyond the dripping fringe of my umbrella as the sky that poured rain all one April Sunday, canceling a picnic I'd been promised on my fifth birthday. Imprisoned by the rain, I paced from edge to edge of my front porch, reaching out to touch cold rivulets that poured down channels of the metal awning. I scanned the solid overcast for breaks, and listened to the droplets hit the roof, imagining I heard diminishment. Between the pillars of my porch I saw the houses of my friends through screens of rain, and thought I saw their faces pressed to windows, longing, as I longed, to cross the street. Between us, the avenue of leafy elms— winter skeletons the week before— writhed in cool wind, and migratory birds, hunched in branches by their half-built nests, complained, complained, with the same uplilting cries as those I hear rise from these maple branches I walk under now. Tm nearly home. I see small faces framed by upstairs windows staring out at me and at the rain that keeps them from the lilac-scented air, and almost hear their bird-like whining calls: Please can we go out? Can we? Can we? But I can't find the key that lets them out, that lets me in, and when I turn, the trees have lost their leaves again, the birds are flown, the high blue winter sky is filled with nothing. The Missouri Review · 237 ...