Rain

This morning I awoke to the sound of rain.

The sound was so unexpected that for a moment I lay in bed, puzzled, vaguely aware of the fact that something had woken me up. Light was starting to trickle through the curtains at the windows, but the sheets were white and clean, and I am pretty sure that nothing feel so good in the morning as stretching out in nice, non-threadbare sheets and then going back to sleep until sunshine gently pulls you to your feet, more awake and alive than you've ever been. But instead of sunshine, there was rain. 

I couldn't believe it.

When I got to Africa in the beginning of May, rainy season had barely ended, and everything in Malawi had been glisteningly vibrant, enchanted by the touch of a wand called "adventure" and attached to a wondrous tag that said "Made in Africa" in the most exotic small print possible. The leaves were still green, and in the evenings the grass would wave pink and gold in the dying sunlight.

Since then, the world has been slowly fading. The grass is now brown and withered, and the trees cling to their half-shriveled leaves like a forty-year-old rebel chasing his rock'n'roll dream. The red dirt has turned into sand which has somehow transformed itself into a fine rusty dust that manages to coat everything. Ugly remnants of shorn corn stalks dot forgotten fields. Every day the sun comes up to greet an ever-browner world, and every night the moon pushes it out of the sky to paint Malawi in a more forgiving, albeit dimmer, light.

But it is not the past three months; it is today, and today, it is raining.

The sound of the water smashing onto the corrugated metal roof increases to a roar, and I fling the door open to rain. The water drips down the roof and hits the ground with a soft splat, and I think that it is maybe the most glorious sound I have ever heard. It embraces the cobblestones and the bark of the trees surrounding us, and there's this white mist rising from the midst of Lake Malawi specifically to greet these most singular raindrops. The air is warm, but not hot, and the humidity, for once in my life, feels delightful and undeserved, like my skin is thanking me for a gift that I didn't pay for.

Rain on Lake Malawi, after it had passed us for a little bit.
Nkhata Bay.
Photo by Adam Ellsworth.

I pull a chair out of the chalet to the front porch and sit down in my tshirt and shorts, with my knees pulled up to my chest, and my hair in the messiest of sleep-tousled ponytails. 

I sit and I finish waking up, and I feel like the world is stretching out in some brand new sheets--that pretty soon the sun will come, take the world by its hand, and pull it back to its feet.

This morning, the rain came down down down 

down

and woke us all 

up.