Abigail Frank Photography: Memories in the Rain

I sat in my room this morning as the rain started falling down outside my window. I picked up a book to bask in the silence of the overcast day as the pitter patter played a song for me. Perhaps it means I'm a bad reader or that the book is just not keeping me inside it's story but frequently my mind falls to things while I read and I find myself a few chapters later knowing everything going on in the fictional world between my hands as well as the stream of thoughts and memories that I suppose my unconscious mind brings to the surface.

We so rarely just let ourselves "be" whether in silence, in music or in conversation. This is why I suppose I love drinking and eating so much because its a great activity to do while spending hours just talking with someone while letting the conversation jump from subject to subject to when you have no recollection of where it began.

My best friend Ashley and I used to as weird as it sounds, go into my little bathroom as kids with blankets and my tape recorder and talk for hours. Every time we thought up a funny voice or bit, we would record it and laugh so hard that tears would stream down our faces. If I can add more of a visual as to how "small" our small bathroom is, it's a room where literally one person could stand in so she would usually be under the sink with a pillow. Since I shared a room and people often slept in my living room especially during the winter because the only source of heat was the fireplace, there weren't many options for solitude.

I love having things remind you of things in your childhood that you temporarily forgot about which happens nearly all the time but the other day I had a blast from the past remembering what it was like to not have hot water. Once you've lived away for a while, you forget the annoyances like pre-starting your car, shoveling your tired and scraping your windows. A memory I was reliving was my mom's showering rules with my sisters and I. One of us had to take a shower at night and we usually had cycles to know who and the other two and my mom would shower in the morning. We had a hot water heater but it only lasted for about a bath (we had no shower) and than usually someone would have to share that water because the time to run pots of hot water from the stove to the tub took a long time. Remembering that makes me cringe at this age because I can't even fathom bathing in someone else's filth, I might just not shower and enjoy the gradual increasing of my own.

As my mind wandered off on these subjects, I realized perhaps the sound of rain reminded me of home and that was perhaps why I loved it so dearly. Although it doesn't snow all the time where I lived, snow was about fifteen minutes up the hill always and there was no lack of rain. I talk to people that lived in the really rainy cities in America and can't even imagine what it was like because I truly felt like it rained a lot in the winter and non-stop sometimes.

Here are some pictures that make me smile.

A picture I took one winter of my sister and cousin-