The summer of 1984 was particularly hot in the Pacific Northwest. The nightly news had started keeping a tally as the number of days without rain began to climb and suddenly those of us living in the land where people joked about declaring the slug the state bird found themselves worrying about water rationing and dried lawns. Even in a state as environmentally conscious as Washington, we’d never heard of el niño or global warming. All we knew was that it was hot. Very hot. At least we thought it was. Of course, no one I knew actually had air conditioning because, essentially, the temperature never rose above about 75’F – and even if it did, we could always count on the Chinook Winds to leave a bit of Alaskan Cold Front on our doorsteps, in the form of the cool, misting rains that defined our little corner of the world. But that summer, Alaska seemed to have forgotten where we lived. The temperature rose and there was no rain to be found.

Sitting by the fan one night, gulping glasses of ice water, my mother came upon the idea that what we needed most of all was to do a rain dance. My brother and I, being of that age when just about anything she said was immediately deemed ridiculous, giggled and scoffed as if to say that no such dance would be occurring: at least, not on our watch. She shrugged her shoulders and said “Fine. Suit yourselves” and continued to sip from a glass that, like the rest of us, was beaded with sweat. A few moments later she got up, however, and as she left the room we heard her voice, barely audible, “… but I can promise you this, it won’t rain until we dance.”

My brother and I laughed again. But this time, we weren’t so confident.

As the youngest, my brother looked to me for reassurance. Was she serious? Was she capable of controlling the weather in order to, if nothing more, simply prove that she could? I couldn’t be sure, but knowing my mother, probably. We cleared our throats and shifted nervously in our seats, but being her daughter, I opted to take my chances and simply shrugged off my brother’s concerns with a look that I hoped conveyed just the right amount of disgust and disinterest.

Four days later: no rain.

In an attempt to adapt to our new surroundings, my brother and I resolved to construct a makeshift wind tunnel in our room. With windows on either end, we set up box fans on each windowsill: one pointing inward; its counterpart blowing out. My brother then happened upon the idea that maybe if we put a container of ice under one of the fans, the sweltering air from outside would hit the freezing air coming off the ice and, like magic, be deliciously transformed into a cool breeze that would be blown directly on us. So… we emptied our two ice trays into a bowl and set their contents onto a table just below the inward blowing fan, and waited. A few minutes later, my mother came in, walked across the room, filled her empty glass with ice, and walked out… but not before saying, “just let me know when you’re ready.”

A week later: no rain.

At dinner a few nights into that second week, poking feebly at three plates of untouched spaghetti, my brother finally cracked. “What is a rain dance?” he asked. Faced with the question, my mother’s expression did not change. For an eternity, she stared blankly ahead, but we knew that look and we could feel the weight of some hidden, sinister smile. Indeed, not looking at us at all, she stabbed and twirled a forkful of equally helpless pasta until we were both convinced she’d decided to ignore us entirely. When she finally did speak, the silence crackled around her.

She told us of a particularly hot summer in New York (where all of us had been born and where she’d spent most of her life). She said the heat and lack of rain had caused people to crank their window-box air conditioners way up, overloading circuit boards and resulting in widespread blackouts across the city. She asked us to imagine a city as large as Manhattan in complete darkness. We nodded, with serious looks on our faces, but we couldn’t imagine it. I still can’t. Then she told the story of one such night, when the world was black, and she and her brother climbed to the top of their building to survey the scene. Below, they could hear sirens and people yelling... things they heard every day, but somehow they sounded different without the comfort of familiar images. She said she had been afraid, (something I had never heard her say before), until finally her brother suggested that they do a rain dance on the roof.

Suddenly we all sprung from our chairs. My mother listed the things we needed to grab: a broom, some wooden spoons, a few pots and pans, a bed sheet, multiple pairs of rolled up socks, all the scarves and hats we could find, the dog, three rolls of toilet paper and my great grandmother’s fur coat. Neither of us thought to ask her if the dance had actually worked.

Within minutes, we were out in the front yard, surveying our pile of contraband. My mother and I strung feathers in our hair from a purple and white boa that had once been part of an old Halloween costume, while my brother took off his shirt so that we could paint a cloud and a lightning bolt on his chest using lip liner and crème eye shadow. When everything was ready, she lowered her voice so that we’d know this was a grave business. My brother reached for my hand.

Then, in a soft and measured tone, she told us to imagine being a cloud, floating above the earth, watching all the things that people did each and every day. “Sometimes,” she explained, “people can be painfully boring.” She offered examples of things that would simply become unbearable to watch over and over: fat men polishing bowling balls, crazy women drawing in their own eyebrows and old man Hester (who lived a few houses down) yelling at us for cutting through his yard. We closed our eyes and climbed the ladder she built for us – until we were so high, we could look down and see the tops of our own heads. “We have to give the clouds something to look at,” she said. “We have to give them a reason to come back.”

And so we did.

The Moody Blues, my mother’s choice of soundtrack, blasted from inside our little four-room house – which was nestled in the alley-way behind the bigger houses on Olympia Ave. – while my brother and I pranced around the yard, whooping and giggling in full rain dance regalia. We banged our crude drums and flung lightweight sock balls into the air on the bed-sheet trampoline. We offered the smelly chinchilla coat as a sacrifice to the angry rain gods and bayed our best pagan yowls as “Nights in White Satin” wafted through the muggy, cloudless sky.

I’m not sure how long the rain dance went on. Even after the police showed up and chided us for being a bit too loud, we continued to dance late into the night. Eventually, we collapsed into a pile of yawns and giggles amidst the scattered remnants of our perfectly heathen ritual. My mother crawled between us, pointing out the constellations and telling stories about each group of stars. And although I can still recall struggling to stay awake, long after my brother had succumbed, it wasn’t long before sleep had its way with all three of us.

The next morning, I awoke to find my mother sitting beneath the cover of the front porch – a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I blinked in the early morning light, my muscles sore from having slept outside. Glancing around the yard, I surveyed the scattered evidence of our late night antics; even then it was clear to me that these were things that were important. These were things that needed to be remembered. Such moments of wistful clarity never last long, however, and soon my eye landed upon my brother, who was still asleep on the soggy grass next to me. Of course, now, it seems as though it was only a day or two later that I’d returned home after many years away only to discover that, in my absence, he’d grown up and into a man I hardly knew… but in that moment, he was still very much my kid brother: a tousled, dark haired scrub of a boy – lost in sleep and completely oblivious to the rain.

Originally from just south of Seattle, Washington, Jennifer Jones is 35 years old and currently lives at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina. After 10 years as an English teacher in the NC public schools, and a brief stint as a copy editor for Losing Today Magazine, she recently decided to retire her red pen and pursue life as, among other things, a fledgling writer. While Rain Dance is not her first foray into this world, it is her first publication.