#100: playing soccer in the rain

By the time you reach adulthood, you are pretty much conditioned to hate the rain.  It makes day-to-day activities like getting a sandwich from that place around the corner or stopping at the ATM across the street something to grumble about.

But when you were a kid, rain meant fun. It meant jumping in big puddles and catching raindrops on your tongue.

For me, I learned to slidetackle in the rain. I was probably 10 or 11 and showed up to soccer practice one Thursday afternoon to the delightful news that the sixteen-or-so girls on my team would be spending the afternoon learning to slidetackle.  None of us wanted to slidetackle each other (and I'm pretty sure that would have ended disastrously anyways), but we spent the afternoon running at full speed in random directions and sliding into puddles.  Sometimes we put a soccer ball in the middle of a giant mud puddle and slid right in.  Sometimes we slid into the mud puddle just for fun.  By the end of practice, we were all soaked and covered in mud, and none of our parents wanted to let us in their cars.  But we couldn't have been happier.  We were delightfully exhausted. An afternoon of running whichever way looked the muddiest thrilled us all.

I felt the same feeling when I jogged onto a soccer field this weekend, in the middle of the pouring rain, appreciating the freedom and careless abandon that came with knowing that we would all be soaked in an instant... and deciding to embrace it.

I took one quick look around to make sure no one was watching, then stuck out my tongue to catch a few raindrops.  AWESOME.