Penny Candy

Do you take your rain drizzled and drawn out over weeks and months like a slow, painful leak? Or all in one fell swoop, an opening of the heavens, a bucketful tipped from above? I grew up with the former and now live in the latter. Sunday night and Monday morning brought the spring downpour, producing images like this:

The sight of my muddy puddled garden sending me into a swoon that it will all be swept away, down a drainpipe in a chocolate mint swirl. But as they always do, the floodwaters subside, the garden survives, the sunshine returns and the following days' skies are bluer than the sky is blue, causing me to wonder how there could be any bad in this world or, really, why any of us has to work inside at all. In University City, the air is a deep, hot breath, thick with college confidence, sun-melted tar and too many flowers blooming, the sticky sickly sweet of a half-sucked Jolly Rancher formed to the soft palette like useless orthodontia.