What a beautiful week! Five days of straight sun, Monday through Friday. It looked marvelous from my seat in Psych.
Of course, it didn’t last long.
The night before the SAT, a torrential downpour woke me up and knocked out the power. If the pounding of watery pellets hadn’t interrupted my parents’ sleep, I would have missed the Saturday SAT essay and maybe some critical reading.
In my urgency to get out of the rain and into my testing room, I forgot to turn my car lights off. Standing outside, waiting for a jump after four hours of testing was quite pleasant.
There is one thing about a rainy weekend, though: it provides plenty of time for chatting with friends on Facebook and watching videos. That is, it would have, if my internet wasn’t down. I guess I got to finish my World History homework for once instead.
Outside, everything is wet. The pavement is stained, the ground is muddy and the roofs drip at every unguttered edge. The gloom is complete in front of Whitman: stains on the wall, bricks a dampened red and light poles pointing skyward under a uniform grey overcast.
And it smells.
The smell reminds me of play dough, potty language and boys-versus-girls soccer games on Wood Acre’s muddy fields. It reminds me of walking in line (1, 2, 3, eyes on me!) to the portables on a rainy day, or sour water colors in art class. The smell is nostalgia, a smell of being innocently dirty.
Appropriately, the smell is actually of worms emerging from the soggy ground outside of Whitman. Gross, you say? That’s exactly what you used to say, along with a funny first-grade giggle.
Outside of our high school, it smells like elementary school.
