Sometimes I know a story is right when the whole world seems to spin it into my lap. Today, I got one of those stories. It started as a journal entry a few days ago, just after a heavy rain. I wrote about the glow of freshly washed leaves, the darkness of the tree trunks, the lambent light in the air. Yesterday I decided to turn it into a story somehow. Over night the rains came. Gentle thunderstorms early in the morning, then off and on showers all day long. The world was telling me to write. Slowly, as I reworked my journal entry, a character emerged. A woman whose desire to be reborn is mirrored in the nascent quality of the world after a rain. The journal entry transformed into a plot, as the steady beat of raindrops on my window set the pace. How perfect that a story inspired by a rainy day got to be finished on a rainy day. The first line of the story is true for me, too: "She likes rainy days the best."
