Where the Rain Takes Me

It starts raining at 3pm. The news murmurs through my year nine English class in the form of an argument.

‘I don’t call that rain,’ one says.

‘No. It’s drizzle,’ says another.

‘Rain. It’s rain…’

Their words blend as I look out the window. Consistent, insistent precipitation. Grey and wet for the end of the day. Typical, it always rains at home time. The clouds gather and the tension builds and down it comes right when we all want to leave or need to stand in line to get the flu shot.

I celebrate my colander impersonation saying ‘I have been jabbed so many times I must surely leak’ and believe myself immune now to Covid and all other diseases. Not that I say that last bit to the nurse. I do, however, dine out on my colander joke, if the meal is a polite chuckle while wiping my shoulder down with an alcohol wipe. Her hands are cool. She apologises but I am glad for her cold touch. It suggests a gentle distance from this unpleasant moment. ‘Relax,’ she instructs. I take a breath and slowly blow it out. ‘Good,’ she says.

Afterward, I update a shared teaching document with details of how the new curriculum is unfurling in my classroom. I want to write ‘It went really well today—a bunch of kids were out playing footy’. Instead, I write about allowing more time and how I will be starting the next class.

‘When it’s quiet and someone zips open their pencil case, I feel like I’m camping,’ says the boy who cannot think a thought without speaking it. He zips his pencil case, watching me for the moment he knows is coming. Zip zip. ‘Camping,’ he nods, and I am there wondering if it is Hubby or one of the kids climbing out of the tent.

‘You’ll be able to walk the Overland Track with Ben. We’ll probably go when he is a teenager,’ says my eldest. We are back in Tassie walking the Overland Track and talking about his baby boy.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘In seventeen years, I will be in my late sixties. I really don’t think I’ll be up to it.’

He pauses. Looks. Sees me. I age in front of him, but he knows me better than I know myself. ‘You could do it if you wanted to,’ he says.

Determined.

It’s code for stubborn, but I’ll take it. I admire determination. Grit.

At the time, the Overland Track was kicking my butt. Then we walked the long day, seventeen kilometers, and I finished well. Cheerful, even. The next two days, both a consistent up and a consistent down, the Track went back to beating me up. It didn’t help that I started my period and my knees were hurting.

Young and old. All at once. The irony wasn’t lost on me, worn out knees complaining about every step I had ever taken, and ovaries thinking I might like a baby when the only baby on my mind is Grandbaby.

Maybe I can walk the Overland Track in my late sixties. With teenage Grandbaby.

Smitton is what a colleague calls me. And I am.

I think about Grandbaby long after his mummy picks him up from our Thursday afternoons together. I loved my own babies deeply—still do—and thought the days of holding open a space for little personalities to emerge were long gone. Now, I have another opportunity for the emergence of a new little personality.

He is learning about loss at the moment, feeling it keenly when someone leaves his world. Admittedly, his world is currently only as big as his field of vision. But, still, he feels it when someone goes.

It will be my job, in the end, to teach him about a deeper loss, about grief. And, if things go as they should, I won’t be the one comforting him, helping him to cope and understand that someone he loves won’t be coming back. There is a certain order to life and, for his sake, I hope his life follows that order. And for mine, too.

I wonder about future eighteen-year-old Grandbaby and the things we will talk about while we walk the Track together. No doubt, he will carry some of my things, worry over me, and maybe even help me set up my gear at the huts—we are already attached; he cries when it is time to go home.

And I will listen to his thoughts and ideas, to his songs, his poems, his hopes and dreams. I will marvel at such a person and all of the things I am learning from him.

Set in.

The rain has set in.