Getting Soaked

16th April 2012 Monday

I’ve been thinking about how do you accept things - I mean really, without a little nagging doubt in the corner of your mind that it could be different - if only.....

On Saturday we walked with my husband’s little family along the beach at Salcombe Regis, skimming flat pebbles across the waves, picking up paper light crab shells, on our way to scavenge chunks of salmon pink calcite from the rockfall - a slice of cliff strata that we found last week - strewn across the beach like layers of Neopolitan ice cream.

We just have time to hack off a few pieces of the stuff before the rain descends, turns into stinging hail and drenches us to the skin in minutes. It’s a long, steep and muddy climb back up to the car, the thunder cracking overhead.

I hate this, says our ten year old nephew, I’m completely soaked.

Well, there’s nothing you can do about it, says his father, so stop whingeing.

It’s horrid being this wet, isn’t it? I say to our boy. I hate it too, and I’m freezing cold. We all look like drowned rats.

I’m as wet as a rat’s nose, he says. We try and find as many words as possible for being drenched and his sister, who is seven, says,

I can’t feel your hand because mine is red raw wet.

It’s true when you are wet you are wet and can’t be anything else. Wanting to be dry when you are wet is hell. But holding someone’s hand in the storm helps a lot.

Today a dear friend walked with me into the raging torrent of my own making - the one where I thought if I waited long enough my husband would become a man like my father. Which is a bit like wanting it to rain from the sun. But she helped me climb out of the water in the end, so happy that my husband isn’t anything like my father and whatever happens with his brain it won’t change my love for him. However soaked I get along the way.