{"id":388,"date":"2003-05-15T13:06:00","date_gmt":"2003-05-15T18:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=388"},"modified":"2003-05-15T13:06:00","modified_gmt":"2003-05-15T18:06:00","slug":"388","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=388","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rain is pending, or it&#8217;s already arrived.  The mosquito screens make it hard to see if something&#8217;s really coming down or not.  I got a few splotches on my car&#8217;s windshield on the way to and from the grocery store for lunch today.  It&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;ve played in the rain, splashed through puddles and the like&#8230;  I used to have so much fun running through the grassy backyard at Euclid road on a rainy day.  Well, before my mom lassoed me and dragged me inside, that is.  But then she would wrap a towel around me and I could sit and listen to the din resounding off the skylight in the kitchen, bare feet in puddles on the linoleum floor.<\/p>\n<p>I cried when I was eleven.  I cried because I could sense my carefree days coming to an end.  I had more responsibility at school and at home, and although I only pinpointed the source of the feelings later while talking with my parents, I could feel my obligations encroaching on my whims&#8230;  The sensations so immediate to that environment, or any in which we lived, didn&#8217;t disappear from my consciousness, though, and they never really have.  It&#8217;s just a simple matter of slowing down and taking stock&#8230;  I remember walking gingerly across the prickly gumballs on the dirt path leading to the neighbor&#8217;s house, collapsing in the yellow, sun-parched grass in Mrs. Donnelly&#8217;s front yard next door, and the sound the plexiglass roof on the tree house made when I hit my head against it.  It&#8217;s no wonder I love smells above all as a source of memory, since if I caught a whiff of something resembling the smell of the freshly painted green shelves in my bedroom, everything would come tumbling back, immediate.  Maybe I cried because I thought these things would disappear?  No, it was a selfish thing, a simple matter of being able to dictate my own schedule, which meant having no set agenda at all, in fact.  But the change is what I want to remember, the turning point.  Taking note of those gives me a clearer bead on why I respond to things in ways that confuse me sometimes, and illuminates the path ahead ever so slightly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rain is pending, or it&#8217;s already arrived. The mosquito screens make it hard to see if something&#8217;s really coming down or not. I got a few splotches on my car&#8217;s windshield on the way to and from the grocery store for lunch today. It&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;ve played in the rain, splashed through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}