It was raining the day she was born.  Sheets of rain fell on freshly plowed fields.  It had been such a dry winter the rain was desperately needed.  She didn’t remember this, of course, but she had heard the story for so long she felt as though she did. 
 
Her father made it seem that it was her birth alone that had saved the spring planting.  That the rain had come to rejoice in her life and spring rains had always been special to her because of it.
 
When she was the only one left to tell the story, she passed it down to her grandchildren.  Telling them of the bleak, frigid winter that preceded her birth, and how just as her mother’s contractions started, the rain began and did not stop until she was two days old.  It was a steady, drenching rain, the earth was so grateful for it that there was no flooding. 
 
It was raining the day they put her into the ground.  It began the moment she died.  Her family stood around her hospital bed and she asked for them to raise the blinds so she could see the sky.  She looked out at the gray winter day, breathed her last breath and the skies opened up. 
 
The earth so grateful for the rain at her birth had a hard coat of ice over it as the men worked to dig her grave, almost as though it were trying to deny her entry.