Rainy Day Fun

WE COULDN’T GET OUTDOORS to play on rainy days, but we had lots of fun fishing in little puddles of water that accumulated by the sides of the big porch after a heavy rain. We would get some of Mother’s pins from her pin cushion, bend them in the shape of fish hooks and attach a long cord string to the bent pins for fishing lines. We would lean over the balustrades, throw the lines, and try to hook dead leaves, sticks, straws or anything we saw floating in the water puddles. These were our fish.

We had been told that if you found a strand of hair under a stone or brick after a rainfall, it was supposed to be your sweetheart’s hair. This may seem uncanny to some people, but nevertheless, we found it to be true in several occasions.

This notion always thrilled and spurred us to make the search. As soon as a shower had ceased long enough for us to get outside without getting wet, we would run into the yard and carefully look under the stones. One by one we would turn them over and scrutinize the ground for a piece of hair. On more than one occasion, we really found strands of long hair. Sometimes they looked as if they came from a horse’s tail or mane, but we didn’t care. It only added to the fun. We had found our sweetheart’s hair, and that was enough excitement to talk about all evening. Sometimes the strand was carefully preserved between the pages of a book for future showing, especially if it looked straight and pretty or resembled the hair of someone whom we especially liked.