4. Get caught...in a rainstorm?

Out of all the days I've spent at home this summer, today was the day I wanted to look my best. After all, I was getting my license renewed, and I did not want to look like a homeless person for my photo. So, like the typical American girl (that I am usually not), I woke up an hour before I was planning to leave, straightened my hair, put on my best makeup, brushed my teeth two or three times...

Fortunately the photo was not excruciatingly embarrassing, and I am now free to drive through America's streets and highways for at least another five years. But something went wrong this afternoon, and instead of looking pretty all day I ended up looking like a wet dog, with my hair sopping-wet and my shirt soaked as if I had jumped in a lake.

It wasn't intentional, let me tell you. My mom, sister, and I did not go on an afternoon walk thinking that it would rain. It had rained last night and this morning, but the dark clouds were moving away so we figured that it was over and done with.

But, as we were walking down our steep hill and back towards the house, we started to feel sprinkles. Then bigger raindrops. And then came the monsoon. Rachel and I tried to run uphill, but the rain was coming down too hard, so we started to walk back instead.

Walking in the rain reminded me of a few Canadians I befriended during freshman year of college. I was a quiet Midwestern girl who had come to Dordt not knowing a soul. My floor was comprised mostly of Canadians from the far-off province of Alberta. They talked about "Edmonton" and "Lethbridge" as if these cities were right next door. They were just as lost when I talked about "Chicago" or "Saint Louis," though. Their Smarties were not our Smarties, and their washroom was not the laundry room at all but the bathroom, I soon found.

But one thing I could hardly ever understand was my one friend's love of rainstorms.

Every time it would rain at Dordt, she would run into my room and say, "Sarah! Let's go puddle jumping! It's pouring out there!"

I would look out my window and shudder. The storm would usually be raging outside, complete with thunder, lightning, and buckets of rainwater. I come from tornado and flash flood country; I survived the '93 Flood and went for a week without electricity when I was in the third grade. Going out into the rainstorm for me was like my Canadian friend walking outside wearing a t-shirt and shorts during a fierce blizzard. It wasn't going to happen.

So, I laughed at the irony when I was walking today and it started to pour. I held out the palms of my hands to feel the raindrops. The water created paths as it trickled down my sunglasses, and I could barely see past them. My sister's shirt was soaked all the way through, and my mom and I couldn't help but laugh as she tried to ring it out. My running shoes were making squishing noises as I walked up the pavement. A car drove by, and we scooted to the side to make sure that we didn't get hit with another puddle. That made the three of us laugh even harder, because we were already soaked to the bone.

Debra Ollivier says in her book Entre Nous that the classic French woman finds happiness and pleasure in the ordinary moments and "evocative power in the seemingly mundane" (5). I think that my Canadian friend--whether or not she realized it--taught me that. I used to think that she was crazy for wanting to go out in a rainstorm. But at the same time, she was just trying to live. As Ollivier points out, doing something like that is just another way of embracing life. So, that's what I did today.

4. Go for a walk in the rain.