“Which one do you like, Mama?”
He clicked through a few options. I heard chanting monks, some kind of yoga zen music and thunder storms all at once.
“What did you download, buddy?”
“Ambience.”
That alone melts a mama heart. He knows I like a little white noise at bedtime, when I read.
After hearing Every. Single. Choice. We settled on Rain on Roof. I remembered being his age, at the family cottage, in the summer, on a gray day.
I lay on the bunk in the upper gable, seeing faces in the knots of raw timbers above me. I listened to the sound of fat drops hitting these shingles my dad replaced nearly every other summer. The water that landed on the sill made the curtains damp. I heard my grandmother rocking just below the stairs, sewing clothes for my Barbie dolls. (Yea, I had Barbies. what of it?)
My mother was always working. Washing dishes or prepping the next meal. If she got to sit, I heard her deep sighs, and the slow flip of paper as she read a book from the library. Dad, in the rain at the cottage, could not work on the roof, or the janky stairs. He could, though, sit on the wrap-around porch, trying flies and fixing poles. The fragrance of his pipe floated up to my little space.
Eventually, my sister or brother lit on an idea, some game we could endure indoors. Our laughter sprang from the four flimsy walls.
Just like that, with a word and a noise, I drifted off listening to Rain on Roof.
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Brock Webster
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http://jenniferluitwieler.com/ Jennifer Luitwieler
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Brock Webster
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