And Again

* I wrote this yesterday afternoon, but my Internet connection was for shit so I couldn’t post it *

It’s raining. Cold and hard. The weather forecast says that there is still some summer to come. But on days like today, it seems unlikely.

It’s been a rough-ish morning with the girls. I’ll blame the rain and the anticipation for their Aunt Judy’s arrival. That’s just the way that kids are, I know. But it’s still annoying as Hell.

I stepped outside just a moment or two ago and stood at the patio door at the end of the breezeway, watching the rain fall and thinking I would cut the girls some slack and make them each a ham sandwich to tide them over until later.

And just as I was about to step back inside and get cracking, it happened again.

There he stood next to me, watching the same rain fall.

“Can’t you make it stop?” I asked. “The rain, I mean…”

“Nope. That’s not covered, Kiddo.”

“What good are you then?” I teased.

He smiled at me and his eyes glistened. We think that in death, the life leaves us. But really, sometimes I think it’s just the other way around.

“What if I told you that you never had to make him feel badly about anything? He does that himself,” Paul said.

“I don’t mean to make him feel badly. I really don’t. But I don’t always know how to tell him things. I don’t always know how to make him realize something.”

“Hmm…that’s not entirely true, Kiddo.”

I feel myself blush and look down at my sneakers.

“He feels like shit, Jan. Don’t leave him there.”

And with that, he was gone again, just as quickly as he had arrived and just as quickly as he had left me in the shower this morning.

These dead people, I’ll tell ya.