The day my brother died there was no rain. Instead, the March sky was a suffocating alabaster, a thin skin stretched so tight there were no cracks for clouds to seep through, let alone a drop of rain.
Outside my bedroom window in early May the rain pounds down, turning to hail, turning back to rain. I open one eye and see that the sky is a riot of black thunderclouds scudding into the side of a double rainbow. Even though it is 8 a.m., my body wants to curl away from the darkening sky, stay in bed, wrap up in the blanket I made David years ago, the one I rescued recently from his home in the woods, the one he kept on his bed, close to his skin. But the blanket is losing David’s smell and I am running out of time. I need to get up, get coffee, get in the car and drive to his house to continue packing him up.
— Excerpt from “Learning to Love Rain,” by Barbara Weiss
