When I Observe Patches Of Rain

(Or, 5 Things About A Rainy Day That I Wish I'd Noticed Before)

1. Early this morning, before. When there wasn't any rain, just the sense of it in the air. Not a smell, but some of me could tell it was there. I walked along the street and some colour caught my eye. I turned around and stopped to stare. Rainbows, filling an entire side of the sky, the most vivid I've ever seen. I carried on walking and kept looking over my shoulder, feeling special because nobody else was up at the ungodly hour to see. I gave up walking and stopped to stare some more.
2. I looked up at the rest of sky to see what else I'd missed in the wake of the rainbows. Upturned bowl folded out above me, for some reason I'm always surprised I can't see a chip. I tilted my head right back in the middle of the street. And I got a big fat dollop of water in my eye for my efforts. I tried to tell myself I should hurry home, but something childish in me didn't want to leave the outside behind as the sky started falling.
3. By this evening there weren't really all that many puddles around. I tried to look for some but the water must have drained away. It looked more like it had soaked into the tarmac, and dead concrete looked halfway alive for once. My stupidly baggy jeans survived my short walk, and I am grateful I didn't have to wring out each leg when I got where I was going.
4. The clouds were still there. The sky was light even past 9 in the evening, and the clouds were an opaque grey in the centre as well as being tinted a murky pink at the edges. Further up were white wisps, looking clean against the pale baby blue. I stopped on a railway bridge to look off into the distance and the horizon was drawn across with a rounded edge, all curves and half circles of solid dark cloud, as solid as the land with its towers and trees. The colours blended and the separating line was between cloud and sky rather than land and cloud.
5. It's dark now and I can't see much of the sky. I can see the leaves on a couple of trees shaded orange by the streetlight. I don't think it's raining but I have to check twice to be sure, listen carefully for any of the giveaway noise. I spend so much working through or around the weather, dodging the rain. Suddenly I'm waiting for a familiar sound, and indoors and dry feels like missing out.