Rain Dance

All day the rain had been showering the pavements, cascading down the office windows in clear beaded curtains.

I stepped out of my building at 5 o'clock, raising my own blue umbrella over my head like a patch of clear sky, plunging into waves of hand-held umbrellas dodging each other and swaying on their stems like brilliant flowers.

Feet picked their way carefully around little lakes on the rain-slick street then, suddenly, leaped!

On 6th Avenue in the 20s a man selling black umbrellas with curved wooden handles unfolded and upended them, hanging one from an awning, then a second from the first, and a third from the second like a series of descending pools in a fountain into which the rain sang. How could I not dance?