True Colors

My home never got much rain. We lived towards the desert, but not like the movie kind of desert, with golden sands and sparkling oases. No sweeping dunes that rose overhead like waves on a raging sea, or anything interesting like that. Instead, we got hot winds nearly year-round, and rain as scarce as coins in a poor man's pocket.

The blistering gales would kill my mama's flowers, no matter how much she watered them, and make her cry over each withered petal. Growing up, I got used to the sun always beating down on my little single family home, just like all the others in our neighborhood. The sun always seemed to shine real bright on my folks and I--which was why that one rainy day in November gave me such a surprise.

Rain wasn't near the kind of mystery that snow was (I still have never seen a flake in my life), but it was certainly something worth running out the door in bare feet to see. But when the rain started on that November day, I was already outside. I found myself staring down at my naked feet when I noticed the first drop splash onto the bricks near my toes, and sink in fast like the brick was tryin' to drink it. It wasn't long until the rain put out the shimmering sun that had shone on my house, on me and my family, for the longest time. The sun that nothin' in the world could ever hide from. Yet as I stood there, staring at my bare feet, at the ground, at anythin' but the woman standing in front of me, I saw somethin' in the rain that I'd never seen before. I saw real color.

I thought I knew color; I knew that those bricks at my feet were red in the sunlight, but in those raindrops I realized that sunshiny red ain't red at all. Those bricks were hiding their colors, I thought, like they were afraid of the sun. When that drop fell from the sky and hit that muted, dusty red, it turned as vibrant a red as mama's famous spaghetti sauce. Or red like...red like I don't even know what. Something like I'd never seen before. That was red. Those raindrops kept fallin' and everything they touched showed off the colors they'd been hiding so long from the bright rays of the sun. Their true colors.

I thought I knew green, but those little drops fell on the leaves on my mama's ficus, and it was like Michelangelo had reached down from the sky and dropped one little dot from his paintbrush onto my front yard. The street in front of my house wasn't the same chalky, cracked street that burned my feet everyday. After just a few minutes, it looked as slick and black as the River Styx from all those Greek stories my mama would read me. I could imagine it flowing towards me, swarming around my ankles and dragging me with it. At the time I'd hoped it would, though I knew that slick black was still just a road. My breath shook me harder than the wind as the rain kept comin', and that day showed me more colors than I could take. It was that rainy day that showed me the truth that stood before me in the quivering shape of my mama, the truth she'd hidden from the sun.

I didn't want to look at her and I didn't want to see the truth. I wanted the black river to wash me away, so I wouldn't have to listen to my mama tell me she was sorry. Again and again and again.

But I did look at her, finally, and saw that the rain brought out her colors, too. Her hair was usually a bright honey that challenged the sun itself, but in the rain it was strings of brown, like strips of split leather. The rain was all over her, glimmering in her hair, running down her flushed face, pouring from her eyes. She wasn't glowing anymore, like she had for the past few months. Like she had when she started workin' more often, not comin' home until the sun had cooled through most of the night and was gettin' ready to heat up again for the next morning. She had once been bright, so bright, but the rain seemed to take that away. That day, the rain showed me the hidden colors in the bricks and the leaves and the street and in the world, but I had learned a lot more than that. In those raindrops, I'd seen the true colors of my mama as she stood on the driveway, cryin' and apologizin' for not wantin' me anymore. The sun that glowed in her wasn't just for me, because there was another man that loved her, and she loved him more than she ever loved me and my daddy.

Mama's colors were somethin' I'd never seen before and never knew existed, like that brilliant red in the bricks. She wasn't hidin' in the sun anymore, and for the first time, I understood. I'd seen her real colors, even the ones that the sun had tried so desperately to hide. But I still knew that under those strips of leathery hair that hung down in her face, she was still the mama that cried when the flowers died, that glowed like gold every time she smiled. And I could learn to love her true colors just as much as I'd loved the mama before I saw her in the rain.

That rainy day, I learned that even in the desert, life isn't always sunny. Life isn't always...bright. But that's okay, because sometimes you can only see clearly in the rain.