It started to rain as I walked to my truck. Not a light rain, not a shower or a sprinkle. It was as though someone had stabbed a hole in the sky, and let all the raindrops in heaven flood out at once. My sweatshirt was soaked before I had my door unlocked; it saturated my already dampened spirit. Our place wasn't far from the high school, so I was home within less than five minutes. I drove past the house and pulled up next to the barn. All four of our horses were standing in one stall, turned against the wind and rain in a huddled mass of horseflesh. The gate to the pen was still open, so I threw hay in each stall and refilled their water buckets. Cleaning stalls could wait, I didn't feel like wrestling with the wheel barrow right at the moment. The sounds of the horses munching hay and shuffling into their stalls went a long way to unwind my nerves, and soon the pressures of the day were an afterthought. I took a clean rag from our big cardboard box and started wiping down bridles. Anything to avoid going to the house and getting the lecture that would be waiting...no doubt the school had called home, they were bad about that it seemed. The slightest thing sent them scurrying to the phone to inform a parent, rarely did I get a chance to deal with things on my own before my mother was alerted to the situation. Realizing I was attempting to clean headstalls that were immaculate to begin with, I put my rag back into the box and walked back out into the rain. The smart thing to do would have been to get back into my pickup, but it seemed too easy. The mud and water pooled around my feet as I stood under the edge of the overhang, making my feet cooler in my boots. It was the first time that entire day that I'd been able to take a deep breath, to exhale without tears spilling from my eyes. My control over my emotions was iron clad most of the time, and I was thankful for that. Standing in the cool air, watching the clouds roll over the hills was almost cathartic. I wasn't sure how long I'd stood there. A trilling noise from my truck brought me out of a daydream, it was that loud. It was a habit, get to school, turn the ringer off. Walk out of school, turn the ringer back up. My day had been such a dramatic episode that I wasn't excited at the prospect of talking to another human being, no matter what the reason, but I dug through my bag until I found it anyway.
I smiled in spite of myself when I read the number that was flashing across the screen; a visit with my knight on the big gray horse was just what I wanted. The sound of the rain pounding the roof of the barn and the sound of his voice in my other ear took me back to that day we'd spent so much time together. I decided the rain might not be so bad after all.