When the rain came back it was like an old friend we’d become dependent upon who’s not good for your health but at least you know what to expect from them. It triggered the sameness of gray, of winter in the Pacific Northwest: how the moss hangs on the trees and blurs in the fog, the rhythmic drumming of it in the gutters, the roofs, the look of it pooling on the patio, the mantra of rain, to sooth or madden.

Dawn and I got up and lay in bed reading on our phones. I brewed the coffee and put the dog out, sat in the den with a low lamp on and some music, watched the light come on slowly outside, faster/earlier now, coming on spring.

I dropped Lily off at school and cooked the oatmeal, kissed Charlotte goodbye, drove to work, had to IM/text a number of people to let me in, white-boarded, sat through a status meeting, drew a process flow on graph paper, hurried my way through a salad-bar lunch, returned to my squatting area in the Microsoft office set aside for transient types (people without desks who need a place to sit and work), fired off emails, answered IM’s, talked to some people, left, stopped at the Whole Foods for a Belgian beer and liquid fish oil, came home, walked the dog.

I tried to drum up something to care or feel about on my walk, to let go. I wrote in my head as I sometimes do, but it’s always better using my hands. I put on a record and regarded the rain, popped a pizza in for the kids, reconstituted soup for Dawn and me.

The rain is really like that, a dull salve for the pain, perhaps the source of it, they’re one in the same.

After dinner I cleaned up and returned to the den, flipped the record, moved the dog bed by the fire. The bistro lights are on out back and there’s still some light in the sky, nearly 6, about the same color as it was in the morning.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, William Pearse writer, work life balance, writing technique