Mama's Rain Listen in RealAudio Email Your Comments

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. To me, the sound of the rain hitting a roof during a storm is tranquil, hypnotic. But for Georgia commentator David Clark, that sound means much more:

"The clouds had been bulging for two solid days, and just needed some little something to make them let go.

The phone rang. It was Dad. The doctor had advised him to put Mom into a nursing home.

God was just waiting for us to hang up the phone. I immediately heard the drops outside my door. I walked straight out to the shelter where my Dad's old 8-N tractor is parked.

I sat in the coming darkness and listened to the low roar on the tin roof and the dripping sounds the water makes in the dirt.

A slow drizzle on a tin roof is the ear's version of a fire. One can get lost in its sound.

I thought of all the times Dad told me the rain falls on the evil and the just. I thought of how he's always said that everything works for the best.

The thunder and lightning of the rains to come in my life will remind me of the first time Mama didn't know me. And while the slow dripping drizzles will always remind me of sitting with Dad when I was a child, the sound of the slow rain on a tin roof will always be Mama's Rain."

David Clark is a writer from Cochran, Georgia. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive, with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.

 

Purchase David Clark's CD "Kindly Curious" 'Memories are made up of events and pictures of life preserved in stories. These stories tell us about life in a way that no book, photogragh, or movie ever can, for they allow us to involve our own imaginations in the creation of the story as we hear it.' -David Clark