I remember the winter it rained for ninety days straight. It was some sort of record. Some days it was just a drizzle, grey clouds menacing, threatening but only producing a trickle of condensation. The dampening effect was lasting though. I was forlorn, a college coed struggling with my own gloomy tendencies. The constant rain seemed to confirm my dramatic melancholy.

I had a yellow rain coat, slick and bright, rubber and durable. I don’t know why I chose the bright yellow, sunshiny and pure. It wasn’t a trendy choice; my fashion sense was not yet refined enough to choose statement pieces. An umbrella was seen as taboo for any true northwesterner, a weather crutch not to be used for its actual purpose. This fact was clear: use of an umbrella would border on blasphemy. So daily I trudged across campus, damp with a constant drizzled sheen, ground ebony and bare; the glory of the autumn colors long decayed to brown and dissipated into the soil, reclaimed to become fodder for the following spring’s renewal.

But that winter the grey reigned, the gloom maintained through the dreary days, weeks, extending into months until even the air seemed to weep. Light and brightness forgotten, buried somewhere deep below, hidden high above.

I remember walking across the center of campus, careful steps on the slick bricks, rumored to have been designed specifically to be slippery, easier to hose down and dispose of protesters should a group of young idealists take to the arena with picket signs and voices raised high. That day, though, it was just ordinary students making their way to lecture halls and labs, the library and the dorms. I stopped midway, and gazed at the sky, willing it to show me a break, a glimmer of respite. Instead, the drops fell large and solitary, coalescing on my upturned face.