Rainy Day Stories

Nancy Adams
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

I have been looking forward to a rainy day ever since I found these ponchos again. I had bought them 10 years ago when all the grandchildren were here for Camp PapaNana, people shoehorned into the cabin and times specially for hiking. Now these little campers are grown up. I have a new set of little grandchildren just the right size for the ponchos. And it is a rainy day.

The older grandchildren discovered an old play that they had put on when they were little, a play they had written to surprise Merv and me. It was the play of the us and the cabin and the land, of little kids and back-to-the-land dreams, of sawing wood and cooking over a fire. The kids dusted it off, assigned the old parts to new young grandchildren who had never heard it or played roles in it. The tall ones played us, hippy skirt, flowing hair, straw hat, work shirt, the little grandchildren played our kids, their parents actually, in a play that they had written and performed several years before. In the play a football team brings in the great 12 x 12's, 8 x 8's, that make the structure of the cabin. The football team characters made light of the burden, tossing it around in the play. Merv and I fell off our chairs in laughter.

We had gotten the hemlock beams from an Amish man beyond Leon up the hill. Merv paid in traveler’s checks. The man had never heard of traveler’s checks but he said “I trust any man once’t,” and accepted them. The wood was delivered up by the road. The cabin site was down through the woods following a snaky path. I tried to move one of the big beams. It was new wet hemlock, long and heavy. I couldn’t move it an inch. Our plans had not extended to the wood’s transport to the cabin. Our plans had not embraced the heft, the weight, the unwieldy nature of the wood. But my Not-Yet-World-Famous-Vegan Sister brought her typical refusal to take no for an answer response to all impediments. She called our Forestville neighbors and drafted the older ones, and the one I call Faithful here. She drafted friends from up the street. She drafted the football team of her high school cheer-leading days.

They all showed up. Together they bent over. Together they got hand holds around the log. Together they moved it. A foot. Together they put it down. Again bending, hand holds, moving, down. Slowly it inched its way to the cabin site. Again they picked it up, hand holds, a foot, down. They collapsed on the ground. All of them. Except Faithful. She stayed with her fingers around the log, trying to budge it, failing. “Take a rest, sit down.” And she wouldn’t. She didn’t. Faithful has never been one to put down a burden once taken up, and she didn’t this time either. Not because of stubbornness, or courage, or conviction. “The beam is on my foot” she explained. “I can’t get it off.” The football team all jumped up and raised the beam and she got her foot out.

That story, the one about Faithful and the beam and the football team, wasn’t in the play. I have to get my hands on the manuscript, because it needs to be there. Because I want all the grandchildren to know that sometimes you are not putting your burden down because you can’t! You are stuck! Say something! We all need that story. Again and again.

We will tell stories tonight. But today we will put on our rain gear. The new group of little grandchildren will garb up in the rainbow slickers. We will hike and get wet and muddy jumping in puddles and catching toads.

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