Every time I passed the woman, she was talking about how much better it would be if it wasn’t cloudy

“Oh, imagine if it was sunny!”
“Would have been so much better with some sun!”
“Oh, and we were so close to having some good weather!”

What we had instead was rain and children’s faces and face paint inexpertly applied (but close to zoo creatures to earn a tight-lipped nod)
And cotton candy and sugar, and balloons beneath a rain-swept canopy
In weather just cold enough to demand a jacket
Beside a lake which was more a bog than pond—a swamp leering in the damp like a deflated balloon,
Reflecting a slate sky remarkable only for its tedium—
An uncanny ability to be even, and to take on no color besides itself, making of the day one long and muted note

Still, I found some quiet comfort in the water’s unflinching commitment to silence and noted that all the ashen hues made the colors of the cotton candy and the painted jaguars and lions pop more alive and bright across smiling young faces oblivious to the weather

I wished she would speak of that, instead,
Even as it started to drizzle—spitting, my Mom used to call it—as I headed for the protection of the canopy

But then I watched her as her son stumbled across the mucky weeds to the water and
She smiled at the way his wonder opened on the world like a bright, pink morning, as he slung a heavy stone across the porous surface
And for a moment I knew she saw nothing but the summer in the greening of his delight

Suddenly she was a child, too, beneath the gunmetal heavens, and suddenly she stumbled towards a sunny day despite herself, and I with her
And finding ourselves suddenly, despite protestations, alive and content and uncut by any dull edge of gray,
I wondered what all our fussing was for
And how it kept us from the world

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