it was only three o'clock in the afternoon and yet outside through the french doors the light gave an impression that it was close to twilight. She stood there as she swept the soft curtains to the side so she could get a better view of the porch that led to her mother's garden. The dark clouds above were getting heavy and although she had the urge to step outside, she resisted, thinking that the wind that was swaying her mother's rose bushes might be uncomfortably cold. She hates it when it's cold. She even wished that her father had not insisted on the marble floors because they get too cold for her feet which she like to keep bare around the house since she was a little girl, something for which her mother had scolded her often. It already seems to be drizzling anyway, she thought as she took another sip of chamomille tea while she tried to figure out something she could do. It was a saturday. She likes her weekends to be worthwhile.
"Don't you just hate it when the weather holds down even your thoughts?" she amusingly says to herself. She couldn't understand why she would tend to attribute gloominess with rain, when somehow she felt that a rainy day does have some minute sense of charm to it. Perhaps she remembers the days when her mother would burst into her room and wake her up just to tell her classes got suspended, and she would curl up under her fleece blanket to continue her sleep. Or perhaps the stormy evenings spent with her beau Jerome at Starbucks Glorietta, waiting for the hard rains and the heavy traffic to subside before driving home. Well if nothing close to charming is happening on such a weather, that would leave you feeling rather gloomy indeed.
The rain began to fall in huge trickles and she watched them fall on the terra cotta porch until it completely turned from brown orange to clay red in about two minutes, after that she moved away from the french doors, walked a few paces towards her mother's baby grand, and sat herself on the bench. She continued watching the rain and the swaying indian pine trees outside. She placed her tea cup atop the piano, and slowly lifted up the wood that hid the ivories. Randomly she tapped on a few high notes and she did it slowly like trickles of water, listening to every note resonate before she shifted into the next. The furniture around that piano room was kept to a minimum so that the instrument's music could be better appreciated. On the walls around the room were reproduction paintings of Pierre Auguste Renoir and on the wall behind her was a huge commissioned painting of her mother wearing a lacy cream dress, arms bare, and playing the same piano. She still had the charm of her early thirties then, on her smile and on the curves of her waist. A small metal plate on the bottom frame bore the name Esperanza. Below the painting was a long but narrow table which held some kind of persian tapestry and a candelabrum with five red candles that had never been burned. The doors which led to the room were always kept closed, and the piano, which had been refurbished thrice over the last thirty years, stood in the center of the room beneath a crystal chandelier. The minimalism of the room has given the piano a tonal quality that could flood your body with it's luscious sound that could sometimes make the crystals above it tinkle. As the intensity of the rains picked up, so did her playing. The high notes she played with her right hand was now accompanied by her other hand playing an arpeggio of keys on the low octave, a stark combination which resembled the rhythm of the rain falling on the porch and on the roof. When the raining began to die down slowly, she ended her song, and looked through the glass of the french doors. She listened to what's left of the rhythm of the rain, until its slow pitter-patter had eventually silenced.
