I love rainy days.  For the longest time I never understood why…but, just last week it hit me.  I grew up in the country on an acre of my grandfather’s (maternal) farm.  The land, I believe, was gifted to my mother and father but, it wasn’t by any means a pristine piece of property.  It was a quagmire created by a natural spring.  It took months of moving and adding dirt just to get it close to being ready to have our trailer moved from the trailer park where we were currently living.  I digress, but I don’t think I have ever publicly said that I started my life living in a trailer park…so, here it is – I started my life living in a trailer park.  I don’t exactly know how long we lived there or how old I was when we moved out but, I fondly remember the older kids there riding bikes around.  I thought they were so cool.  They would pop a wheelie and bunny hop the pot holes.  I remember the grouchy neighbor man named Bunk and the trailer on the other side of ours had two spinning things on its roof that I loved to watch through my bedroom window.  There was this girl, she was a year or two older than I was and our parents were friends and always told us that we were going to get married.  It annoyed me, she annoyed me but, I always tried to do things that would impress her.  To further digress, I went to a dance with her when I was a sophomore in high school – we went to different schools…she turned out to be a really nice and good looking girl.  But, I could never get over the whole “you two are gonna get married” thing.  I had a small part in setting her up with a friend who is now her husband.  The trailer park was a very interesting part of my life that produced a lot of memories that I suppressed because I always felt embarrassed about being cast into the category of trailer trash.

So, when all of the bulldozing was complete we moved the single-wide trailer to the newly level plot of dirt and rocks.  Being a kid with a dirt front yard was a dream come true.  It was a major change in my life…I could walk to Grandma and Pappy’s house, I didn’t have to watch out for cars, I was allowed to play outside and go a far as I wanted as long as I could still hear mom call me back for lunch, supper or baseball.  There were fields to run in, woods to cut paths through, corn fields to get lost in, a barn to climb in, wild animals, and did I mention that my front yard was nothing but dirt and rocks. After a few years of what I remember being paradise things started to change.  My parents moved the trailer again and started digging what would end up being the foundation for our basement.  The coolest part was all the dirt from the hole was moved to the side of our land in one gigantic pile that I called “the big mountain”.  My days were soon spent conquering this mountain and keeping it safe from all forms of invasion both foreign and domestic.  I was in a He-Man phase and “the big mountain” was my Castle Grayskull…I even had a sword my Uncle cut me out of wood.  He over did it and I could only drag it but it was still awesome.  I was even convinced that from atop my mountain I could throw rocks and hit airplanes as they flew overhead.

On the front side of our property was a small creek or crick as I say.  When I wasn’t protecting my mountain I was in the crick slowly picking up rocks, so not to muddy the water, trying to catch crawfish or frogs.  When it rained I would take the spring off of clothes pins and use each wooden piece as a boat and race them down the crick.  I can still hear my commentary in my head.  Life was perfect.  I was outside from morning until dark or until baseball.  I never walked I ran everywhere and as fast as I could.  I remember loving to run at dusk…for some reason it made me feel even faster.

Soon enough the basement was finished and the trailer was moved on top of half of it and a temporary roof was put on the other side.  This would be our semi-permanent house for the next few years and around this time is when life began to stop being fun…apparently I was old enough to work.  The dirt and rock filled yard needed grass for some reason and it was my job to pick up the rocks and put them in the wheelbarrow…mom and dad both helped but, it seemed like we picked rocks from that yard for decades.  I had to help bail hay and weed eat the crick.  This changed my love for running through the fields and playing in the crick.  I even started hating the barn because after you picked up a bail of hay from the field you had to pick it up again to move it into the barn. My father and my Grandfather (paternal) started a 18-wheeler trucking company that involved me really doing nothing but, every time they had to work on something (every Saturday morning) I had to be there too.  My other set of Grandparents only lived a mile away and that is where the trucks were kept.  Their house was boring to me and I only seemed to get in the way of the guys trying to fix things so, I would wonder around bored out of my mind.  I hated semi-trucks for this and other reasons…work related as I got even older.  The only parts I truly enjoyed about going there were Grandma’s burgers and milkshakes, my Paps silly nicknames for me and the fact that my dad would allow to run back to our house and follow me in the pickup truck.

Here comes one of those few magic moments in life.  I had a baseball game on a Saturday that was cancelled because of the weather and I vividly remember, while on the ride home , being and most definitely showing disappointment.  My dad said that it is okay the game will get rescheduled and I responded I wasn’t disappointed about the game. I was upset that when we got home we would have work to do.  He smiled and said we need the rain and sometimes we pray for it but we certainly do not do much work in it just like you not being able to play your game in it.  Within moments I fell truly, madly, and deeply in love with rainy days because those are days that not working is okay.

– The Dirt Paved Road