Rain Song

The basalt land has half a year of sunshine and the other half of the year is reserved for rain. After a long period of time, the first rain of the season is always highly anticipated. It seems that in that anticipation there is also mood, nostalgia, and habit.

After the first rain of the season, people will sow the prepared ground with seeds that were stored from the previous season. Seasons will follow each other, greening with hope. The streets, which were pale after the scorching hot days, are washed away by the rain. The road seems to be scooped up from a river, pure and cool. The trees and leaves also rejoice with the rain, turning green.

After the rain, the flowers of summer will awaken, blooming brightly on every street. My small city has some plants that are so familiar that just by appearing in a photo posted somewhere on social media, there will immediately be a lot of people commenting; each comment is usually associated with some very memorable memories.

Like that afternoon, while taking shelter from the rain, I accidentally came across a photo with a few status lines in a Gia Lai group. The photo was created by a young person using AI. It was a scene of a person sitting in a coffee shop looking out the window. The scene outside had a few shabby wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs hidden under the canopy of pine trees on a road covered in red dirt, the sky was covered with rain and mist. The photo made many people, including me, drift back to Pleiku in the 80s and 90s of the last century.

Those were the days when Pleiku was still very deserted. Only a few main roads in the town center were paved. Most of the houses were made of wooden planks, roofed with corrugated iron or fiber cement. The houses were small and low, sometimes completely hidden under the sharp, winding slopes. Even the shops were small and shabby. And it rained a lot that day.

I used to live as if immersed in the rainy months without seeing the sun. We sat in a small shop with the fragrant smell of pine in the middle of a rainy afternoon and the mist swirled around. The pine trees were right next to the window, you could clearly see the transparent drops of water landing on the needle-shaped leaves, then slowly rolling and falling. Perhaps, those days partly created our personalities, quiet and taciturn.

Moving further away from the suburbs. The rainy season makes people reluctant to move because the dirt roads are muddy and slippery. The red dirt sticks to clothes and is very difficult to wash off. Perhaps in my memory will forever be the image of the houses made of wooden planks stained with red dirt in the suburbs and the children soaked from bathing in the rain in the ditch in front of the house.

Heavy rains flooded the streets like a red river. The rain brought dirt back to the ground, and mist sprinkled on the hills. The rain also brought with it the gentle joys and sorrows of a pure, innocent childhood.

Sometimes, the rain makes me slow down, like a highlight in a piece of music with a regular, repetitive melody. In the rain, I can hear a long-forgotten nursery rhyme; I can see my mother’s hands moving quickly like a shuttle, trying to finish her work in the fields in the twilight storm or my father’s thin back trying to pull the raincoat to cover his child from the rain… All are beautiful memories and if I could write music, I would now compose a rain song for myself!

Source: https://baogialai.com.vn/khuc-mua-post324021.html