The Day Rain Drove Us Together

A raucous rainstorm drove me and my wife under the half of the house I had finished sheathing only a few days earlier.  We stood there in the semi-dry watching a stiff rain drive down through the open trusses on the half of the house I had framed but not yet roofed.  The plywood decking on the floor there quickly puddled with water and floated sawdust into occasional islands.   A summertime chill brought my wife and me into an embrace as we watched the bruised sky and the rain.  The air filled with the scent of damp wood and exposed earth come wet.

“Will the rain hurt the floor?” my wife asked me.

“No,” I answered.  “The house will survive this.”

We had been married for almost six years that summer.  We spent that entire spring, summer and fall building our own house.  And inside the framing of the very wall we stood next to during that rainstorm, I tacked some photos, some paper money and some trinkets just before the drywall went up.

All of those artifacts are still there.  And the roof truss signed in carpenter’s pencil by me and my buddies as a birthday present for my wife is still standing firm where we set it place above the living room.  Only my wife is gone—gone on this very day two years ago.

How could we know then, as we embraced during that storm, that in that very spot where we huddled together against the chill—nineteen years later—I would hold her hand as she faded away?

--Mitchell Hegman

A photograph Uyen took of our house a few days before the rain in 1991.