Rainy Day Blues

On the morning of the fourth day of our vacation, the sky outside the tent was heavy with the coming rain. I pushed our bedding into the center of the tent and piled on top the two dozen stuffed animals who had accompanied us to New Hampshire. Then we walked through the drizzle to Don’s sister’s camper, where three of his siblings and his parents had convened for a mini, mid-summer reunion.

We had planned to drive to the White Mountains that day; instead we crowded into the camper to watch E.T. When it was over, we looked outside hopefully, ready for bocce ball and swimming, only to find that the surface of the lake was still dimpled with rain.

“Want to read Wings of Fire?” I asked. The kids and I settled sanguinely on the floor of the screened-in porch, water dripping through the roof into pots and bowls around us, and imagined ourselves hiding behind a waterfall with the dragonets of Pyrhhia.

But what at first had been cozy soon became claustrophobic. By early afternoon, my voice was hoarse and the book’s cover was limp with humidity. Clayton had fallen into an immutable funk, which even a walk to the camp store for ice-cream did little to dispel; after four days of intense sugar consumption, one meager fudgsicle had no chance of producing the same high.  

“Roller-skating?” I suggested, casting around for some fun, indoor activity.
The rink was closed until four.

“Bowling?”

“Not if Granny and Papa aren’t going!”

Finally, desperate to do something, Don and I mobilized the troops for a hike at a lake a few miles down the road. Clayton slumped in the back seat, determined to be miserable.

At the trailhead, my spirits rose. The path leading into the woods was verdant and picturesque, with patches of delicate grass growing on the trail and a light mist among the trees. It was exactly the kind of long, lush stretch that, horseback, would have invited a canter. I immediately knew just what I would have done had I been there as a child without a mount.

“Come on!” I called to the kids. “Let’s ride our horses!”

The girls hardly missed a beat before swinging a leg over their own steeds. Gathering up the reins, we took off at a gallop.

I had done it for Clayton. I rarely share in my kids’ imaginary play anymore, but the old adage is true: you’re only as happy as your least happy child. Clayton’s funk was dragging me down, and I’d hoped a healthy dose of make-believe and an invigorating gallop might snap him out of it.

It did not. Despite my pleas, he refused to mount his own horse, but plodded mournfully after us, holding his father’s hand.

The girls, though, were in the spirit.

“What’s your horse’s name?” Dee Dee asked me eagerly.

“Midnight,” I said, forgetting that name was already taken by our one black chicken.

“Mine’s is Forest!” She paused, considering. “Is Midnight a girl or a boy?”

“A boy,” I said without thinking, even though as soon as I said it I suspected that she might actually be a mare. It was as if I had sensed where this conversation was going, and some old heterocentricity had flared up in me: Dee Dee’s horse would be a girl, so mine should be—

“Momma, how do horses get married?”

“They don’t, actually.”

“Oh. So how do they have babies?

“Um, well, they have sex. Like the chickens.”

Sylvia perked up, eager to show off her new knowledge of the birds and the bees.

“So they put the penis in the—”

“Uh-huh.”

“Momma,” said Dee Dee. “Can we make Forest and Midnight do—”

“No!”

This conversation had proved impossible at a gallop. We had slowed to a walk and were suddenly being swarmed by mosquitoes.

“We’d better check in with your dad, girls,” I said. Don is driven so mad by bugs that mosquitoes were my number one worry about our wedding: it had been all too easy to imagine him slapping and cursing through the entire outdoor ceremony.

The girls and I trotted back along the trail, the air around us thick with bugs. By the time we reached Don and Clayton, it was obvious that continuing any further was out of the question. I looked at Clayton, expecting to see that his misery had only been deepened by the swarming bugs.

Instead, he was pounding his father on the back, cheered by the little black smudges left on his t-shirt— evidence of all the causalities he’d inflicted on the enemy.

“Die!” he cried, slapping yet another. Clearly battling a mosquito army had done what an imaginary gallop had failed to: Clayton was animated once more.

“Run!” I cried. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is far easier to gallop with a full bladder than to run. On the bright side, clearly nothing cheers a bunch of kids with the rainy day blues like their mother wetting her pants a little.

“Wait!” Dee Dee said, laughing. “I need to pee too!”

Since staying still for any length of time was treacherous, I tried my best to hurry the process along.

“But Momma! I have to wipe!” she protested, stubbornly reaching for a nearby green leaf.

“No! That’s poison ivy!”

I found a crumpled piece of paper towel and handed it to Dee Dee. Then we all climbed into the car. When we finally stopped laughing about Momma’s accident and Dee Dee almost wiping with poison ivy, I asked, “Dee Dee, what did you do with your toilet paper?”

“I threw it at your back,” she said matter-of-factly,  launching us all into giggles again.
With our hilarity came a new-found optimism. When we passed a playground on the way back to the campsite, Don swung the car into a U-turn. Maybe there’d be fewer mosquitoes here? Given the rain, I had assumed it would be deserted, but a half a dozen kids, faces smeared with icing, were scattered about the playground. Their moms stood by, deep in conversation near a discarded Dunkin Donuts box. As our three kids climbed on the carousel, a little chocolate-faced boy rushed up.

“Can I ride, too?”

“Sure!” I said. “Hold on tight!”

I began to push the carousel, faster and faster. Suddenly the little boy flew through the air, landing in a heap on the wet mulch.

His mom barely looked our way. “Oh, he’s always falling off of stuff,” she called.

Then an older boy tried to persuade Clayton to join them for hide-and-seek, and he politely assented, even though playing with unfamiliar kids is decidedly not his cup of tea.

After one game, though, he sought me out.

“Can we go now?” he said.

But as we began walking to the car, the boy came after us.

“Hey dude!” he called out to Clayton.

“Yeah?”

“Want to be friends?”

“Um, okay,” Clayton said.

The other boy nodded, as if— hide-and-seek or not— at least that was taken care of.

“I’ll probably never see him again,” Clayton said quietly as we climbed into the car.

“No, probably not,” Don agreed. “But at least now you have a friend in New Hampshire!”

We were giggling again, and kept at it all the way home.

“Oh, he’s always falling off of stuff.”

“Hey dude! Want to be friends?”

“What’d you do with your toilet paper?”

“I threw it at your back.”

When we arrived at the camper, the kids rushed inside, busting a gut to tell their grandparents and aunts and uncles that their mom had peed her pants and Dee Dee— “Clayton, no, don’t say it!”— had almost wiped with poison ivy.