I used to dread a rainy day. Especially a rainy Monday. It tugged on my mood until it was dragging the muddy ground. But when my miserable sunny Monday morning twisted into a gloriously rainy Monday afternoon, I found myself switching sides.
I’m not the only wife to argue with her husband. I’m fairly certain. And with two very distinctively stubborn personalities, it always makes for an exciting showdown. So when I told Mike I wanted to stay in town after an argument, he didn’t put up a fuss.
He left me there.
Of course, I hadn’t quite thought things through. I was eight miles from home, no car, no husband, and I hadn’t had any breakfast, so I was cranky and hungry. But it was a beautiful day, so I resigned myself to wander the streets of Blue Ridge, looking for things to entertain me.
I had no idea they started the wine tasting so early in the morning. It was barely ten-thirty and I was sipping blueberry wine on an empty stomach. After a few different varieties, I wandered back to the streets to the next stop along the way, wondering how I was going to get home.
I texted the kids (they were due back to town sometime that morning) asking them to swing by to get me, and they told me they hadn’t left Atlanta yet. This meant I still had almost two hours to kill and I was already a litle tipsy.
Nothing like a few samples of fudge to take the edge off the hunger, right? Ok, so more than just a few samples. But who can resist homemade fudge?
I stopped at the local malt shop and grabbed a bite to eat and bit the bullet, calling my husband to come get me. I wasn’t giving in, mind you. He had already texted me to apologize for the argument. I can’t say I’d completely forgiven him yet, but I was running out of things to do.
By the time he arrived, and we finished eating (the burger I ordered was far more than I could eat alone, especially after several pieces of fudge) the skies had opened up and we found ourselves several blocks from the car, in the middle of a deluge.
We stood under an awning, watching the rain fall as thunder shook the sky, and listened to an old man tell stories of what the tourist town was like when he was a kid. He pointed out the fudge shop across the way, and said it used to be a cafe. And the antique shop down the block had once been a hardware store. He talked about the time the river flooded and the dam broke, and how he and his sister had danced around in the muddy water as it washed out the sidewalks.
We were there for more than an hour as the rain beat down from above, listening to his fascinating tales, forgetting what we had argued about in the first place. When the rain let up a little, we made a run for it, laughing hysterically as we got thoroughly soaked on the way to the car.
By the time we got home, the sky was blue again…the last traces of rain all but gone. It was as if the rain had made a visit for the express purpose of holding us hostage under that awning with the man…forcing us to hear about a simpler time. A time we both yearned for, but had never truly understood. It was what drove us to move to the farm to begin with. And here we were, seeing it first hand through the eyes of someone who had lived it.
It really put things into perspective. Life has a crazy way of doing that, I guess.
Until the next time…I’ll be looking at rainy Monday’s with new eyes.