Out on a Saturday walk at the Milton Trail with Mrs. A and the dogs, the sky is bruised and roiling with rain-pregnant clouds.

On the ground the leaves weave a beautiful carpet of gold, ocher, and jade. Wet trees hang heavily and create a tunnel above, and we are walking into a cornucopia of color.

A few yards below us, a stream filled from previous cloud bursts, gushes around logs pushing leaf boats down dizzying eddies.

We slog up the path as the squall lets go the first volley of several gully washers.

The rain is thick and hard but the sound is muffled by the leaf-covered turf.

In the series of storms that are ghosting through the region, the air is the color of wet cement, the wind forces sheets of water against trees, tearing loose leaves that have not yet volunteered to fall on their own.

In moderation, rain is a good thing, but there is the trouble of too much of a good thing.

Every winter, somewhere in this country, it seems that one hundred year floods take their toll, reminding us that we can control only so much, for so long. A home within reach of a moving channel of water can be idyllic, or it can be hellish with not much room in between.

With the record flooding that inundated the area last week, people whose homes are near rivers or streams are digging out and reassessing their choice of location.

If you can cast a fly rod from your deck, you have likely called your insurance agent about that flood clause in your contract, but if you are fortunate enough to live on ground that is above flood stage, then a record rainfall is just an overly wet anomaly, a footnote in your personal weather experience.

On the trail, I ask Mrs. A if she ever played in the rain as a kid. "Not really, I stayed inside when it rained, mostly."

"But didn't you put on a raincoat and splash in puddles, build dams and make ships from sticks and leaves?" I asked.

"That's boy stuff," she said. And she is right, because when I was a boy I made dams that rivaled the work of beavers, made ships from perfectly shaped hunks of alder, with sails of maple leaves and twigs.

I stood with my head back and drank in the drops and felt the torrents of water down the neck of my soaked shirt. I splashed in puddles just to see the bottoms of those pools exposed, to send waves in circular walls as far as they might travel.

Returning home then, the mustiness of the laundry room embraced me when I walked in the door. My clothes in a heap by the dryer, wet hair, wet skin, wet underpants, no need for a shower. Just a warm robe or blanket and the TV or fireplace, and I was sated as a boy could be.

In our living room, the rain tapped against the big picture window like an entreaty to come back outside.

A walk in the rain reminds us of those youthful days. When you didn't need a bicycle, a trip to the amusement park, ice cream or frisbees.

Just you and a weather event. Crouched by a new river, formed along the curb of what used to be your street, creating small seas above a leaf-plugged storm drain, you could soak up the humidity, breathing in through your nose a little more of what you are made of, exhaling it to start again, you become the rain.

Even after I grew up, I walked alone in downpours to collect my thoughts, umbrella on my shoulder, or with buddies around the park, raincoats and boots, chatting mindlessly. We could smell the earth meeting water, binding us, replacing the artificial, the meaningless. It provided a place to go that is always there when it rains.