100 Songs for 100 Moods

If you have a rainy day...

The Blower's Daughter by Damien Rice

It was raining and grey. Quiet. My favorite kind of day. Ricky's mission papers were filed. We were all anxious to hear where he'd go--glued to the mailbox, checking the calendar. I was still in shock that he wanted to go at all. He'd been nineteen for months without saying a word, and then suddenly it was February and we were waiting.

It was a rainy day when he picked me up for a mystery date--a surprise to me, because our dates were usually take out and movie night in the basement. We headed to Salt Lake in the rain, avoiding the freeway, listening to this on repeat.

The date was to see the Joseph Smith movie in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, where we politely held hands but both bawled silently in the dark. I convinced myself two years was shorter than I thought it would be. He bought me a glass statue of Botticelli's Venus in a funny art shop in Crossroads Mall. The traffic was jammed right in the spaghetti bowl going home.

The windows were rainy and steamy. Damien Rice filled the silence. I distanced myself from him in my head, but if he'd have let me, I would have clutched to him and sobbed, "Don't go!"

I know tears streaming and rain falling is such a cliched image, but sometimes the truth is a cliche.