I like this rain.

I was a student at a music preparatory school growing up - I spent every Saturday from the age of six to seventeen on the campus of a local state university, though it was a college when I started. Some days my mom or, when I was older, a friend with a car would give me a lift, but most of the time I caught the bus. The campus locked down to vehicular traffic on weekends and the bus stop was on the opposite side of the school from the music building, so getting to class meant a bit of a walk. And in the fall, when the weather turned, the rain as I remember it fell lightly but in quantity, whispering against the interlocked pavement stones and chilling everything it touched, but chilling it gently.

When I would get home my father would more often than not be lying on the living room floor, propped up on a gigantic corduroy pillow with a bag of potato chips on his chest, watching whoever was playing whoever in football that weekend and generally being disinterested in everything else. It was quiet, the bored-but-resigned-to-it quiet, and the afternoons stretched.

Tropical storm Danny is spinning its way up the coast right now and it's playing games with the already-fickle Massachusetts weather - it's 59 degrees in August, and the rain is falling slow, sucking the blinds lazily into the open windows and washing the heat away and nothing is moving with any real determination. Angela is half asleep, napping at noon, and the Chargers are going to be playing the Falcons later.

It's melancholy, but not in an uninviting way, like an old teacher you've just reacquainted with. It's homey and still, and for the first time in a long while I'm realizing that this, in some small way, is what I've been missing so much about New Jersey, and that now it's here with me and I might as well make it comfortable because it's going to be crashing on the couch until April, eating my junk food and drying itself off with my towels and singing along with my radio.

And I think I'm okay with that.