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I haven’t taken a walk in the rain for years, but after sitting in front of a computer screen for what seems like a week, I need some air. Putting on my rain gear—jackets, pants, and boots—I feel old, stiff, bent over. As dreary as Maine in mud season on a rainy day.

I used to walk in the rain a lot, especially during what I refer to as “my other life.” I did it to escape a failing marriage, which I remember as one rainy day after another anyway. I walked in the woods and along the rocky ocean shores in Down east Maine, feeling the rain and fog against my face, smelling the sea, and hearing the loons’ mournful cry out of the fog, “ooh, ooh, oooooh.” Wet rocks glistened, as if they were crying, and more than once I slipped or fell trying to walk on wet seaweed. All of which mirrored how I felt about my life.

I remember my tears as I walked in the rain, usually head down, hunched over, my hands deep in my pockets, back to the Ronald McDonald House from the hospital where my daughter lay dying of cancer, the cold wind off the river blowing pellets of fear into my heart.

But there’s no ocean shore here, no river, just a housing development and a lot of puddles. As I walk out the door and into the street, reflections of the trees overhead in these puddles double the number of branches so that I feel surrounded by trees, lost in trees above and below me. It’s a strange sensation, but not at all an unpleasant one, a disappearing into the landscape, and I find myself wondering if, when I die, death isn’t going to be something like this. If it is, I think, it won’t be so bad.

Earlier in the day, it rained hard, but now the rain is light, tap-dancing on the hood of my raincoat. I remember Gene Kelly, tap-dancing and singing “Singing in the Rain,” the first movie I think I ever saw in a drive-In theater. This would have been in the early to mid 1950s, and I’m pretty sure the local drive-in had just opened. My parents bundled us three kids into our pjs and the back seat of our 1948 Ford to see what I later studied in a film class as the quintessential movie musical. What I recall most clearly is, as Kelly splashed through the puddles crooning “dancin’ and singin’ in the rain,” (check the scene out on YouTube; I guarantee you’ll feel better), my father muttering, “damn fool’ll probably be in bed for week with pneumonia.”

I start thinking of other rain-songs. When I first began paying attention to music on the radio, there was Johnny Raye, a pre-Elvis teenage heartthrob, singing “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” A line from a Sinatra ballad comes drizzling down from the clouds: “Here’s that rainy day they told me about…” And when I was in high school, I remember the Everly Brothers singing, “I do my Cryin’ in the Rain.”

The next thing I know, I’m on my knees in wet dirt, cutting beet greens in the rain as it beats a rock & roll rhythm on my yellow rubber slicker. (And were they hot!) God, this memory must be from sixty years ago. For four summers, I worked in a market garden with some high school buddies for a guy who was one of the first in the area to package vegetables for local supermarkets. I still have a faint scar on my left index finger from when my wet knife slipped and added some bloody protein to the beet greens. Still, if the rain kept up and we were lucky, we’d get to work inside, washing greens and flirting with the girls who packaged them, while we listened to the Everly Brothers on a small radio on a shelf in the corner.

Not for the first time, I realize that one of those workdays in the garden would kill me now—that it’s all I can do to kneel and get up, let alone do any work on my knees.

Still, after heart surgery, I’m happy to be able to walk at all.

I decide to cut across behind the houses to the power line, where the remaining patches of ice glisten in last year’s wet leaves.

I head into the woods, still thinking about rain songs (I can’t remember what day of the week it is, but I can remember songs): “Rain Drops,” by Dee Clark. “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan. “Rainy Days and Mondays,” by the Carpenters. “Have you ever seen the Rain,” by Credence Clearwater Revival.

There’s also Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women,” but that’s about smoking pot. Which makes me wonder if I’m sorry never to have smoked the stuff. Of course, I can do it legally now. There’s a cannabis dispensary just up the street. But the last thing an addictive personality like mine needs is something else to get hooked on. I’ll stick to chocolate. Come to think of it, a cup of hot chocolate would be good when I get home.

It’s raining harder now, more of a tattoo than a tap-dance. I tighten my hood and think back twenty-some years to when Mary Lee and I were in Edinburgh, Scotland in a driving rain, attending the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the annual performance of military bands on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Even under a downpour, the place was packed, all of us sitting in our rain gear, peering down at the soldiers who looked like performing undersea creatures in kilts. Despite the rain—or maybe being drenched seemed to make us all feel a little closer to each other, laugh a little more—it was a great evening, one of those joyful times that makes me grateful for the gift of life, despite—or again, maybe because of—the various hardships and disappointments I’ve experienced.

I follow a slippery path up a rise and through the trees to a pond, dimpled today by the rain. The ice is gone, and at the further end, I hear the first wood-frogs of the spring, their breeding calls sounding like ducks quacking. “Winter is over,” they (sort of) sing, “time to make a little love!”

Mmmm. I suddenly feel younger. I start planning this weekend’s date night with my wife.

Somewhere, off to my right, a woodpecker adds more rhythm to the day. Which may mean the grubs and other insects are out or that it, too, is looking for a mate. Either way, another sign of spring.

The rain is letting up, the sky is clearing, and I find myself disappointed. Yes, rain is traditionally associated with crying and sadness, but I feel watered, rejuvenated, if you will, like a withered plant who’s just been tended to.

I head for home, more—do I dare say it?—spring in my step.

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