The house I grew up in had a large screened-in porch looking over the backyard. It was like an outdoor great room, on one side a long dining table, on the other side a white wicker couch and chairs with thick cushions covered in a white polka dotted kelly green fabric. It wasn’t the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house, not even in the top three, but it was my favorite. Ask me about summer growing up in western Pennsylvania and my first memory is not the tightness of chlorine dried skin or the one week at the beach or sunburns or running home when the last bit of light faded from the sky at night.
The first, the favorite, memory is that couch and the hours I lay on it reading, a book propped on my stomach, my head smushing the pale yellow accent pillows at one end, my feet propped against the wicker arm along the other end since it wasn’t long enough for a full stretch out. A bowl of fruit on the (also wicker) coffee table beside me.
The very best times on that couch were when it was pouring rain. Soothingly loud, drowning out any bickering from inside the house, background for whatever world I had disappeared into. The rain pulled nature around me like a quilt, an insulation, a cocoon. Like a companion, that rain, like a comforting grandmother humming, ‘I’m here, you’re loved, I’m here, you’re safe, go ahead and sail off to far away lands, for right now I’ll keep the world out, I’ll keep you both tethered and adrift.’
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