The Beatles were wrong

Happiness is a large puddle.
Let me explain. First of all, I hate to brag, especially since it's not something we want. But while the rest of the country suffers from severe drought, we've had pretty much a solid week of rain and cloudiness here. I was happy for the first day or so, but now it's getting old. I really wish the rain would move on to other parts of the country which so desperately need it!
I made it in to work yesterday when it was only sprinkling. Five minutes later, it was pouring and I thanked the powers that be for having held it off that long. I was not so lucky after work. My bike doesn't have splatter guards over the tires so I not only get rain in my face, I get splashed by the rain and mud that's kicked up by my tires. It's not pleasant. I've started wearing sunglasses when it's really rainy so that I can at least see, otherwise I'm squinting through all the wetness in my eyes and it's just a bad situation.
On my way home yesterday I was mentally grumbling about how wet and muddy it is, how filthy I was getting, etc, and suddenly I remembered something that happened a long, long time ago.
When I was in sixth grade, one of the sewers on my cul-de-sac got stopped up over the winter. Being Washington, that meant some pretty serious flooding on the street. It was a wide road, and the sewer was, of course, in a low point. Well, we had some epic rains one week and that part of the road flooded so much that if it hadn't been a road, it would have been considered a small pond. This puddle went from one side of the road to the other and almost reached the top of the sidewalks in places. (A good 6 inches deep, in other words.) What's a kid to do? Ride their bike through the puddle, of course! I spent several hours out there, riding back and forth, seeing how big a splash I could make, seeing how fast I could go through the puddle. A friend joined me and by the end of it, we were soaked from head to toe. I ended up stripping down in the laundry room where my mother brought me a towel, so that I wouldn't get the floors all wet. It was a marvelous afternoon.
Thinking of that, I realized that, hey! I'm on my way home! I didn't have anything I needed to do, no real reason to keep my clothes pristine and un-muddied. There was no reason why riding in the rain should make me unhappy. I spent the rest of the ride home splashing my way through puddles, getting my pants and even my shirt soaked with water and splattered with mud. I stripped down on the landing in the garage (praying that the neighbors wouldn't come home just then--they didn't) so that I wouldn't get my own floors wet, and I had a grin from ear to ear. Every once in a while, it's nice to remember that childish fun is still fun when you're an adult. When life gives you puddles, splash in them.