The drops drum the skin of my umbrella—the jazzy flame-red one, the newest in my growing collection. This year, I’ve retired the flashy fuchsia one I bought when I moved to Bangor and for the first time in my life both needed and wanted a pod of fabric balancing over my head.
Although the rest of you may not be exactly ecstatic when the rains come, I am so ecstatic, I now have six umbrellas—the red one, a geometric-patterned one, a brilliant purple, an in-your-face pink-and-yellow floral, a basic black, and a small orange one that, folded, fits in the palm of my hand. Recently I’ve been tempted to order a transparent one with illuminated waves of fluorescent green I saw in a catalog, of all places
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I look up through the roof of my umbrella. It shimmers pale pink berries of water everywhere. The full-throated sky looms through the fabric, an ache of sun balanced somewhere farther out.
As a child I could have had an umbrella. Growing up in Boston in a family that didn’t drive, I walked to school, to church, to the local park, and navigated my way through my teen years on buses and subways. But I have no recollection of ever having had an umbrella. Raincoats—I do remember raincoats—seemed enough. Now they are too much for me, a reminder of enclosure and restriction.
With my umbrella, I feel my steps lighten, as if the scoop of air under the ribs and the rhythm of the drops have come together to compose new ways of walking in the world. Certainly not the intent of umbrellas when they were invented thousands of years ago—in China or Africa—to shield bodies from the quiet sun (umbra means shadow—there is no shadow this day).
Each rain has a different score, and if I were a musician, I would tell you the 4/4, 6/4, 2/94 signature of this rain. This rain, this rain playing on my umbrella, is not Henry Butler, or Shemekia Copeland, or B.B. King, forceful and bold, raw rhythms hungry for saturation.
Today’s rain is quieter, working out a new rhythm through the sky. I can feel it.
I want to dance the crosswalk, and so I do, at first careful not to appear to take too long for the drivers who have stopped to let me pass—until I look into the windshield of the point-car, its wipers swishing back and forth, and realize that the dancing is a good thing—not just for me, the middle-aged dancer with the creaky knees, but also for the driver who is smiling, then laughing, and—look—now nodding vigorously, as I pass off the tarmac stage.
He rolls down the window and calls “thanks,” as he continues his drive to work or the grocery store, perhaps his child’s school. But wherever he’s headed, I’m pretty sure the “dancing umbrella woman” will be with him.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Most recently, her work has been included in the poetry anthology The Other Side of Sorrow, published last month. She will be reading from the collection at various locations in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts.
