“Anyone who thinks that sunshine is pure happiness, has never danced in the rain”.
-Unknown
I really love the rain, I don’t know why, but I would rather be wet and cold out on a city street than dry and warm sunbathing on a poolside in the summer sun. Maybe it is due to the freezing temperature ideal for good slumber. How many times have I heard people commenting about wanting to sleep in on a work day just because it has rained through the night and it is hard to get up in the morning? Or If I go all Freudian, I would say it is because of the ingrained happy memories of my childhood past.
We only have two seasons in our country the summer season and the rainy season. I have no idea when it became a law but the school year commence just as the rainy season begin. As a little kid, I am guilty about being overjoyed whenever school gets cancelled because of a signal number two or signal number three storms since per DECS (now DepEd) and our school handbook, classes will still carry on if the storm is just a signal number one, thus I always hope for the former. This means I have to stay at home and watch all the cartoons and television programs I miss on school days. But there are plenty of times when we are already at school and a thunderstorm would escalate onto a full-blown super storm. The announcement of class cancellation was a saving grace for an impending long quiz on a subsequent mathematics subject and a second chance to revamp a rushed art project. One of its perks is also having more money. Because I did not get to spend my food allowance that day, I get to spend it on something else.
Back then it seems that all children as long as you live in the same street and at the same age, means you are friends or “magkalaro”. I did not grow up in a gated community or an exclusive subdivision, fortunately so. The fact is I would have not chosen it any other way. I was privileged enough to have played all the interactive Filipino games like patintero, moro-moro, taguan, bang-sak, piko, etc with my childhood friends. And it was much more fun playing these games under the rain. When the raindrops start to fall, by some supernatural belief, we would first try to counter it by drawing huge sun images on the pavement, we may also sing, “rain, rain go away” while doing so. But if it is really going to rain, we hoped for it to rain hard, otherwise our parents or guardians will not permit us to soak in the rain because a drizzle can only make us sick. I have no idea about the psychology behind this but it is one of the few Filipino rain urban legends, other examples are: the rain can cure prickly heat, “alimuong” (smell of the rain) can give you a stomachache and best of all a “tikbalang” (a centaur-like mythical character, having a human body but a head that of a horse) is getting married when it is raining but the sun is still shining.
Where we enjoy most of our time during the rainstorm is under a particular two-storey white house with a busted rain gutter, hence creating what my friends and I call, “rain gutter falls”. We would all be lined up in front of that house with our backs receiving the impact of the rainfall. We sang or shout at each other and be fascinated by our reverberating voices. A few times we also experienced flooding that may reach up to the knees or the hips. Lo and behold, it was such a delight to those who were not able to go to the beach in the summer months.
In retrospect, I find most of the things I love about the rain when I was younger shallow and sleazy. I will not, for the love of everything that is good, ever again swim in a flood polluted with rubbish. Nor do I promote laziness in school because one can just wish for a super storm. Yet isn’t that what children do? We do not over-think or over-analyze things, we just do. That is why we get to see and experience more of the world. We enjoy ourselves more.
I reckon that is what I miss most about being a kid, the naïveté and the carefree attitude. There are no monthly bills to pay, no hard labor to do, no expectations to meet and no grave responsibilities to answer--our parents or guardians are in charge of that. You are only expected to play, be with your friends, be cherished by your family and have a wonderful time of your life.
So whenever it rains, I think of happy thoughts and I wish that all children in the world get to practice their rights to being a child in a happy and safe environment. Most importantly, I pray the rain brings hope just like the rainbow that comes after it.
