Come Again Another Day

On Sunday, we decided it would be fun to take a little stroll down to Penn’s Landing. We both absolutely adore wandering through Old City and Society Hill, and it was the perfect lazy afternoon for a walk. We walked past all the cute old townhomes, speed-walk-raced a horse carriage up Lombard, and said hello to the church where Joseph Smith preached.

So here we are on a quiet Sabbath, just wandering around (still in our respective skirts/dress pants, mind you) when all of a sudden, I feel a raindrop. We ignore it, thinking it would just sprinkle a little. And then they sky opened. Without notice, it just started pouring. So our umbrella-less selves quickly ducked under a tree, and when that didn’t really do anything, we huddled under a teeny Old City awning…well, it’s more of a 6-inch overhang than an awning.

So here we are, hugging this random wall, when (how this was even possible, I don’t know) it starts to rain EVEN harder. So we climb up on the steps to stand directly in front of the door to sneak a couple extra inches of coverage. We’re just chatting while watching the rain when all of a sudden, the door flies open behind us. We turn abruptly to find a nice, middle-aged woman framed in the opening. We hastily (and flustered-ly, in my case) explain how we were just trying to take refuge from the downpour, did she mind if strangers just invaded her doorstep and passed the time there? Luckily, she was nice enough to not mind, and we turned back to the wetness.

Since it was raining so unbelievably hard, it couldn’t possibly last very long, right? Um, yeah. About that. Forty-five minutes later, we were STILL on this random woman’s doorstep. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for running about in a drizzle, especially when clothed in pajamas and/or my ladybug galoshes. But when in a skirt and dressy shoes and when it is pouring buckets upon buckets of water, yeah, not so much. So Dan finally suggests that maybe we should just ask if we could possibly borrow an umbrella. I laugh this off, thinking it absurd. But when the rain seriously didn’t even slow down, I figured, hey, why not?

So yeah. We knocked on a random woman’s door to ask to borrow an umbrella. The best part was that she actually asked us to hold on while she went to check (she didn’t actually live there – she was visiting her son), and came back with her son, her husbands, and not one, but TWO umbrellas in tow. They were seriously the nicest people – they asked if we wanted to come in to dry off, told us to keep the umbrellas as long as we needed, and told us we should come over some time, as he had just moved to the neighborhood from Brooklyn Heights. Clearly we will be taking them some sort of sweet treat in honor of their newfound status of Nicest People on the Planet.

And then we came home to find a hole in our guest room ceiling with water gushing through. Yay, rain!