Waitin' On A Sunny Day

It would be cliche to expound on how when I was a boy I used to walk a mile.to school. In the snow. Uphill. It would also be worth pointing out that there were plenty of mornings when a certain amount of whining could get me a ride up that hill in the relative comfort and style of my father's company car: a Ford Granada. When I was in elementary school, it was less than a mile, and it was on a lazy slope downhill, but we were routinely asked to go outside for recess during the Rocky Mountain Winter. A good chunk of those fifteen minutes were spend in front of the closet where we stowed our foul weather gear, struggling to get our boots and hats and gloves affixed before we ventured out of the room to alternately shiver and frolic in the snow. Since we were forbidden from picking up any snow, much less throwing it, this provided for some very tedious attempts at other games and activities that we might normally pursue during a thaw. When the bell rang, we would all troop back into the building and spend another fifteen minutes pulling off wet galoshes and hanging scarves and mittens where they might have a chance to get dry by lunch, when the whole process started over again.
That was my life on the frontier. Now I live and work in a place that has rain. We don't send our kids out in the rain. They won't frolic or shiver. They stay inside and wait for the all clear. After a few days of steady downpours, teachers and students are more than willing to overlook the puddles and a little slipping and sliding. Even if we don't send them out in the deluge, we still have a few who insist, during their trips to the bathroom or delivering the daily attendance, on experiencing the maximum amount of dampness possible. Try as we might to keep them dry, a certain percentage of our students go home moist.
And so we watch the skies, and hope for a few days of sunshine in the coming days. Patience of humans short and tall is on the thin side, and there are just so many games of "Heads Up, Seven Up" that any of us can stand. But every so often, when the skies open up, I see visions of that sweet ride in my dad's 1975 Granada.