A Good Cry

“Sometimes you just need a good cry.” Most all of the women in my life have said this to me at one time or another. Mothers, aunts, girlfriends, cousins, grandmothers, friends, my wife, Oprah. All of them. They all have tried to impart the wisdom that a “good cry” can really do wonders for your psyche. Truth be told my psyche has been the problem. Or maybe it’s my ego. Either way I was raised in the storied male tradition of “boys don’t cry” so I would never give it a chance. My theme song could have been, “Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red, crying’s not for me.”

Speaking of raindrops. Growing up in the south you learn there are all different kinds of storms. There are angry, violent, deadly ones that spawn tornados, but those are usually from somewhere else, out west mostly. Then there are the soakers. They have very little thunder, and what they have is gentle and quiet and actually quite soothing. It will rain steady, but not too hard, for hours. This is the best kind to sleep to and if you are lucky they come on Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons and go on into the night, periodically breaking long enough for you to run to the grocery store or grill some hamburgers for supper. These rains are welcomed by all (except maybe Little Leaguers wanting to “get their game in”), because they replenish the water table, refill the ponds, and get the creeks flowing steadily again.

The crazy uncle to the soaker is the gully washer. Whereas the soaker comes on slow and easy and leaves quietly like a polite houseguest, the gully washer shows up unexpectedly, is loud and leaves abruptly with nothing but a mess in its wake. A gully washer will give you a lot of water in just a few minutes and then return the sun just as quickly, producing an environment best compared to a sauna. On a positive note the culverts and drainage ditches (gully’s) have been cleaned out, although most of their flotsam and jetsam is now strewn about your front yard or neighborhood streets.

Summer storms are flashy and loud and fun to watch. They are great to sit out in and feel the spray of rain and the cool of the wind. They are like teenage boys or spring time turkeys, which really are just different breeds of the same species, at least as judged by their behavior around females. These storms strut across the county like they are showing off for Mother Nature, not realizing she has seen it all and just rolls her eyes and keeps busy doing what she does and lets him have his fun. 

My daddy always hated the dreaded “misting rain.” Just enough precipitation to need to use your windshield wipers (although you can’t ever seem to get them set to the right speed), but not enough for them to do anything more than smear up the windshield so that you can’t see. Getting caught out in it just gets you aggravated, like trying to get ready in a bathroom where someone is showering. The humidity making the air just moist enough to mess up the hair on your head and stick to the hair on your arms.

One good thing that all storms have in common is the intoxicating aroma of rain coming on, something they also share with a good cry. Before the first tear falls you can sense its arrival, feeling it in your bones the way old timers talk about how they know from their knees before they know from the weatherman that it’s going to rain. When the levee finally breaks and the streams runs down your face and drip off the tip of your nose you catch a brief hint of salt and water, not unlike standing on the shore. There’s a lot of similarities in a tear drop and a rain drop.

My heart has experienced a little of all of these storms, the literal and the emotional. The ones where I shout and shake my fists at the heavens, demanding answers that I already know like a thunderstorm raging. The ones where I quickly cry myself out and collapse in a heap and mess on the floor like a gully washer. The ones where the tears flow so freely you wonder if you will dehydrate before you stop like a soaker. I’ve even weathered the ones where the tears linger on the rim of my eyes as I ache for them to fall, but they just won’t come, leaving me with an unfulfilled frustration that turns sadness to anger, like a misting rain.

“Crying’s not for me.” That was then, this is now. Sometimes I wonder why I do it to myself. Perhaps its a form of emotional sadism. It could be a song, a story, a movie or a memory that makes the conditions favorable for precipitation, but I can always feel it coming, building in my chest the way you can feel a summer storm building in the afternoon. At first it's just blistering heat and then the air gets heavy as it begins to soak up all the atmospheric moisture. The wind begins to stir the hot, syrup thick air and you catch the first whiff of rain just before the drops begin to fall. Within minutes the wind howls, the thunder shakes the walls and the rain gushes from the sky like a waterfall. Once those storms rain themselves out the air is left sweet and soft and cool and everything has been refreshed and cleansed. The pollen and dust has been washed away and the storm drains flushed out. It's amazing how a good cry can do the same for your soul. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear thunder.