Saturday, May 23, 2009

Another Farmer's Mare Story


I was shopping for a present several years ago when a thunderstorm rolled across the city. I was at Park Plaza, an enclosed mall where the stores open onto a three-story atrium topped by a vaulted, glass roof.

As the storm moved in, the sky grew dark, and the rains came down hard. For a time, I could hear hail hitting the glass. The noise was so loud that everybody around me stopped talking in mid-sentence and waited for the storm to pass. It was too loud to shout over.

I walked out to the atrium and looked up at the dark windows, then I looked down at the food court one floor below. I saw two young women sitting across from each another at a table, both animated and talking as if it were a bright and sunny day.

They were speaking in sign language, and they were the only people in the whole place who weren't being drowned out by the storm.

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