A Little Rain

By Silvie Senauke

One of my earliest memories of my grandmother’s house in Portland, Oregon is a bright pink bicycle and the sloping lawns in front of the houses on the same block. I became uncomfortably familiar with the grass and sidewalk outside my grandma’s house the summer I learned how to ride the pink bike. I can still remember the fear of crashing that took over each time I set out, and the burning feeling of scraping up against the concrete as I inevitably toppled over.

My Aunt Deb’s encouraging voice stays with me also. It is thanks to her that I can now ride a bike; she persevered, picking me up each time I crashed to the ground. It went pretty much like any “learn how to ride a bike” scene you’ve ever watched in a movie, with her pushing and running (or, looking back, possibly walking) along behind, holding me steady, then letting go without telling me. It was she who figured out what would be the key to my eventual bicycle success—the need for me to firmly hold on to the handlebars. I had been loosely grasping them, somehow more willing to let the contraption decide where I would go, invariably the ground, than to take responsibility myself.

I also have Aunt Deb to thank for my shoe-tying abilities, since it was she who taught me how to arrange the loops. Everyone else had blindly repeated “chase the rabbit into the hole,” a metaphor with which I still see no connection to the art of shoe-tying. Some of my earliest steps towards maturity were taken at my grandmother and aunt’s house, and I looked forward to each summer’s visit with the anticipation of a small child going to a candy store.

***

One drowsy summer afternoon Aunt Deb lured me out of the cool house and around the corner to the neighborhood playground with the promise of candy. I skipped down the sidewalk while she explained that, unbeknownst to me, she had gone out and hidden sticks of gum in various places around the park. I raced across the woodchip entrance to the playground and over to the slide, searching frantically for the white paper wrappers.

“I found one Aunt Deb! I found one!” I shouted out to her, still on the move looking for more. “Is there one over here? … Oh, there it is!” I raced off to the tire swing, then to the monkey bars, while Aunt Deb sat laughing on a bench at the edge of the playground.

“What about over here?” I called out, pointing to the old log teeter-totter. She smiled, taking pleasure in my own delight. She shook her head and pointed discreetly to the swings, then theatrically held her hand to her mouth as if she had revealed a big secret. I kicked up woodchips running over to the place she had indicated. I finally found the prize, and Aunt Deb stood up and yelled to me “That’s the last one Sil! Come back here and share a piece with your aunt.”

I approached her cautiously, wrapping my dirty hands tight around my prizes in order to keep them safe from any potential thievery. She broke down my defenses by unashamedly tickling me until I laughed out loud and spilled the gum onto the ground. Still giggling, we collected the pieces and I generously deigned to give her one.

***

Each summer we would spend a week of the trip on the Oregon coast. My dad couldn’t stand it there. It’s not what’s on postcards of ideal summer beach escapes. The wind is strong and cold, the tide strong and colder. When it’s sunny the sand burns your feet, and when it’s not there are torrential rainstorms that whip the sand around your legs until it feels like you’re being attacked by several swarms of angry bees. But I loved to stand in the tight line of my aunt, grandmother, and mother, us against the ocean with the waves crashing over my head, then to close the sliding glass doors and be safe with my family in the reassuring hotel rooms I’ve known longer than I’ve known my brother.

I loved the summer trips to Portland because they were my time to have as much fun as possible, and to have all of the attention on me. My mom would stay in the house with my little brother and grandmother, and Aunt Deb would take me out for activities, like the gum-hunt, she had designed especially for me. Or she would patiently teach me how to play badminton in the front yard, or we’d play hide-and-seek in the rose garden across the street, or my mother, brother, and grandmother would come berry picking with us, and then all of us would turn baking a pie into the most hilarious activity ever.

Each year of my childhood was marked by the unchanging trip to Oregon. I look back on those years, those visits, with some amount of amazement—how could I have ever been so happy? How could my greatest annoyance be the fact that I wasn’t allowed to walk to the circle store by myself? Days in Oregon passed lazily, filled by trips to the neighborhood pool, the local science museum, and repeated excursions to watch the remade Parent Trap. I was blithely unaware of anything but myself.

The year I was eleven was a rainy year. The last few days of the trip were spent locked up in the house in Portland. Games of Guess Who? and Spit could only last so long before they became unbearably repetitive, and I’d even managed to tire of the seemingly endless options on cable TV. The rose garden in front of my grandmother’s house was swollen with water, and the sky an endless grey.

By then I had developed a keen awareness of the weather. Peering out of the front window I could pinpoint the places where raindrops were visible: the dark roofs of the houses across the rose garden, the road, the puddles that formed on the sidewalk. In the early afternoon I glanced out of the window to discover that the rain had stopped, though the weather still looked dreary.

“Mom, mom!” I called, running through the house. “It’s not raining!” My mother looked at me suspiciously, and then went to the window to check herself.

“How can you tell?” she asked me, staring up at the unchanged sky. I pointed at the black roof of the house across the street.

“Usually you can see the raindrops coming down over there, but there aren’t any right now!”

“Let’s go out with everyone then, since it’s the last day we’re here. What’s left on the list?” Each year we made a list of the things each person definitely wants to do during the trip. I knew which one I would pick.

“The zoo!” My mother bit her lip.

“Let’s ask Aunt Deb if she thinks it’s a good idea.”

 “Pleeeeeease…” I begged Aunt Deb. “We didn’t go last year and it’s not raining and …” She hesitated. Now, I can look back and guess at what she was thinking. Her eyes probably flicked to my grandmother, sitting in her well-worn armchair. After that they probably moved to the window, where the trees that line the sidewalk were still dripping with rain. She probably looked at the sky wondering how likely it was to rain again, and then back to my grandmother, while she calculated the pros and cons of going. But I didn’t know any of that then—I didn’t think to consider it. She finally sighed and nodded. I squealed, running to go get dressed, while my mom and aunt got my grandmother ready for the outing.

That zoo trip is not different from any other in my memory. It doesn’t stand out as particularly anything. I loved the penguins even though they smelled like farm animals, and ran as fast as I could down the slope that led to the monkeys.  We bought elephant ears, which are not in fact some strange exotic delicacy, but instead fried dough coated with a mountain of brown sugar and cinammon—the most delicious and horrendously unhealthy treat ever. It must have started raining again at some point, the light drizzle that makes my hair frizz and always seems to be present in Portland but isn’t heavy enough to force you back inside, but at the time that wouldn’t have struck me as important.

We flew home the next day, and my life returned to the normal routine of whatever eleven-year-olds do all the time. I assume I sat around playing The Sims with my friend and, when we were feeling more active, choreographing and videotaping our own dance routines to various Britney Spears songs. Oregon returned the quiet corner of my mind, waiting for the next summer when I would bring it out again.

Maybe a week or so later, however, it was dragged back to center stage. Every Sunday morning my mom called Aunt Deb and spent at least an hour talking to her, checking in—what I had always thought was typical sister talk. That Sunday I wandered into the kitchen looking for something to eat, and found my mom seated at the kitchen table listening intently on the phone. I could tell this was serious; she hardly looked up when I entered and ignored my whispered requests for breakfast. I sat down to wait for her to finish, but the conversation dragged on and on, and all I was getting out of it was the occasional sympathetic “hmmmmmm,” or “have you asked…” Finally I left the room.

That evening at dinner I learned that my grandma had developed pneumonia after we had left. Or, more likely, that it had been slowly developing for a while. I was never told directly what was happening. What I learned I gleaned from listening to my parents talk, and to further frenzied phone conversations as my grandma’s condition steadily worsened, eventually landing her in the hospital. It wasn’t something I understood the meaning of, really. When you’re eleven it’s not exactly clear that the elderly have a weakened immune system. Pneumonia apparently was some sort of extreme version of a cold, a version that was putting my grandmother at great risk.

I worried about it, but had no clue how to react.  And, thinking back on the trip, an uncomfortable guilty feeling began to creep up from the bottom of my stomach each time the conversation turned to my grandma. Rain, cold, pnemonia, rain, cold, pnemonia, rain, cold, pnemonia. Zoo. Suddenly in my head it made perfect sense that this had all happened because of the trip to the zoo. Which was my decision. I had pushed for it, it had been my one wish and I hadn’t even thought to consider why it might not be a good idea. No, just the zoo and the little bit of clear sky and my begging, and now this. Now my aunt was scared, my mom was worried, and the phone bill was going through the roof.

***

Oregon trips after that changed. I felt older—more responsible. My grandma recovered. Or, she recovered mostly. She got out of the hospital and came back home, but soon after that she also broke her hip. Aunt Deb quit her job to take care of her. It seemed like my world turned. I was no longer the center of attention; trips to Oregon were now centered around making sure my grandmother was okay and that Aunt Deb got a break. While my grandma’s pneumonia did improve, her health, which had never been great while I was a child, dwindled. Aunt Deb continued to take care of her, but to ensure that the work didn’t fall solely to my aunt, we decided to hire a couple part-time care-takers. One of them had two little girls, Harper and Marina, and their family became incorporated into each year’s beach trip.

 Slowly, the Oregon trips got whittled down to only the beach trip. With my brother, Marina, Harper, and my wheelchair-bound grandmother, there was no room left for me to be selfish. Though I had some internal grumbling, I helped shop for meals, took a turn watching the kids at the pool, and volunteered to walk them up to the candy store. I even tried to help cook on occasion, though it wasn’t my most successful endeavor.

On a rare almost sunny day, puzzles and board games brought to entertain already exhausted, all of the kids clamored to be allowed down into the waves. While they begged, I could see the thoughts whirling in my mother’s and aunt’s minds. They looked at each other, debating who had the energy to stay in the room and take care of my grandmother and who had the energy to brave the beach with the kids. They hesitated, I suspected because they wanted to rest as much as my brother and Marina and Harper wanted to run wild outside. Lying across the couch and staring outside at the ocean, I called out to my mom, “I’ll go down with them.” She looked back gratefully.

“Okay guys, suits on; let’s go.” I rounded them up and we headed down to the beach, racing across the hot sand to where the waves inched toward our toes. As I looked back at the hotel—where I could see my mom, aunt, and grandma watching us from the porch—my brother and the two girls bounded carefree into the crashing waves. I raced forward to grab the two girls’ hands, remembering the times when my aunt and grandma would do the same for me. The four of us screamed as waves crashed in front of us, and I held the girls’ hands tighter. They tugged on my arms, pulled me in deeper, and gleefully jumped as water sprayed over their heads. I silently debated how far was safe.

“Let’s stay here guys.”