April Showers

 "It's raining. It's pouring. The old man is snoring…"

 I hear the child singing this song as he jumps with glee into yet another puddle.  His mother mutters his name and something else inaudible under her breath, not wanting the people on the sidewalk to hear her frustration.  She pulls on his hand, looped into hers at the end of his blue plastic slicker.  She is huddled beneath a loose green scarf and black umbrella on her busy way to, or from, somewhere.  Her son picks up his galoshes-clad feet and drops them like rocks into a pool.

 "He went to bed and bumped his head…"

 "…and couldn't get up in the morning."  I finish the child's rhyme and drop him a wink as I pass.

 Every time it rains, this song goes through my head.  This one and  "Rain, rain, Go away; come again some other day,"  refuse to be relegated to memory.  Is it the rain that children dislike?  Or is it the fact that their parents will not let them outside when it is raining?  I can remember staying on the playground as long as the teachers would let me, letting the rain soak my hair before going back into the classroom after a freak afternoon storm.  And what kid doesn't like a good puddle to jump in?

 There is a theory that human beings cannot understand a thing without the experience of its opposite.  We cannot know love without knowing hate, we cannot know good without knowing evil, and we cannot know dry without knowing wet.  Perhaps children know this, and so they go to extremes while most adults try to maintain something in the middle.

 I contemplate this world of binary opposites, and I leap with both feet into the next puddle I see.

 What rainy day rhymes have you heard?  What memories do you associate with them?