Bless Me, Ultima

10 Beautiful Things

8. Falling asleep to the sound of rain

When I was a kid my parents would take us on family vacations. We left in the early morning to avoid traffic but I was never awake then. I remember my mother picking me up, wrapped in my blanket, and carrying me out to the car. I lay half-awake, my head pressed to the glass window, not seeing anything but darkness but hearing the movement all around me. My brothers climbing into their seats, toys clattering. My parents speaking in hushed voices and the ignition humming. Then the bump of the curb as we backed out of the driveway.

All these things lulled me to sleep. Then, a few hours later I would wake when the car pulled into a rest stop. While my parents led my brothers to the restrooms, I curled on the seat and listened to the quiet.

The best times were when I woke to a gray sky and a thousand droplets a fraction of an inch from my face. Just glass between the world and I. Sometimes I counted those drops and pretended each was a family like mine. The smaller ones were people all alone, but they eventually drifted into a larger drop and became a big family.

Other times I lazed between consciousness and sleep, listening to the rain hit the roof. It seemed endless and impossible that water should fall from the sky. With nothing to hold it up, no one to sprinkle the moisture onto the earth below, and still rain fell. Every time I fell asleep to the sound of rain, it felt like being cradled in the hands of a mystery. And I guess that's the only time I ever believed in a god, when there was no explanation for something so beautiful and it didn't seem to need an explanation. It just was.

"'There are many gods,' Cico whispered, 'gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards-but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones'" (Bless Me Ultima 237).