It is raining today. Pouring really hard. During my lunch break, I drove a mile up the road and parked in an empty parking lot. It is so hard to sit in the office all day and not cry, so sometimes for that hour I just go someplace and cry where no one will notice.

I love the rain. Always have loved the sound of it hitting the roof, even the roof of a car. I always wanted a piece of tin outside my bedroom window for the rain to hit but have never managed to actually get out and get one.

Most of my memories as a child include the rain. The smells ... the sounds. I spent a lot of time as a kid laying on the floor between my bed and the wall reading. We had an attic fan and it would pull the cooler air in through the windows and laying there on the floor it would blow right over me. (It was also a good place to be in the house but be "out of sight out of mind" . Sometimes in my house the more invisible you could make yourself the safer you were.) If it was raining and no one noticed and turned the fan off, it would pull little droplets of rain in and they would land on me too, cooling me off in that southern humid summer heat that is like no other kind. My kids have no clue what it is like to not have air conditioning. I hope they never have to find out either!

Back when my children were in school, I loved nothing more on a rainy day than to hurry and finish up all the housework and cooking so I could lay across the bed and read. My old Daschund abhorred the rain. Could not STAND to go out to pee when it was raining. She would stay in that nice, soft warm waterbed most of the day, under the covers. When I would lay down, she would grunt and get up and walk over to me and flop back down with her back against mine.

I still like to lay across the bed and listen to the rain - the biggest difference is I can no longer lay there and read, I just drop off to sleep. My old weenie dog has long passed away years ago at the age of 13, and now there is Thomas, my 2 year old mixed breed mutt, but the warmth of his non-judgemental rolly-polly body is just as welcome.

Sometimes I think sleeping is my drug of choice...my way of escape. There are no calories and you can't get arrested for driving afterwards. If I lived alone, I wouldn't even feel guilty for it.