When at long last the storm slows down, loud pounding starts up at my back door.

I live in a neighborhood full of people-friendly folks to the point where the blooming of one daffodil or the advent of a solstice is reason enough to celebrate. Truth time: We've been known to toast a five o'clock high tide. But today, it's still too early for toasting anything, so I suspect a neighbor is banging at my back door to find out whether or not my cable is out. (It is.) Nothing unhinges some people I know like missing one minute of "Days of Our Lives."

So I answer the banging back door and there stands Big Ed (the Fig Filcher) Cheshire. Barefooted, he is wearing a pair of muddy Bermuda shorts and a wet T-shirt.

"You gotta come outside right now," he barks.

I look over his shoulder. It is still spitting rain.

"Big Ed, I don't want to go out. It's messy. I'm barefooted. I'm wearing clean clothes. I'm fixing to dry my hair."

"You don't need shoes," he grunts while pulling me out the door.

"Big Ed, where are we going?"

His Cheshire cat grin (pardon the pun) comes close to being contagious. "We're gonna wade in some mud puddles."

I lock my knees and shake my head. "Oh no we are not!"

Ignoring me, he drags my rigid body out to a crater-turned-mud hole, big enough to house the QE-2, then pulls us both smack in to the middle of it. Big Ed grins while I wonder what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this. I stare at my next-door neighbor and try to figure out what reality-shattering event might have taken place that I didn't hear about. Did worlds collide? Was I catapulted into this incredibly weird moment in time?

"Makes you feel like you're four-years-old again, doesn't it?"

Big Ed clearly expects this sixty-something-year-old grandmother to answer him in a positive vein. I look at him and continue to wonder about what occurrence I might have missed on CNN.

I'm about to suggest a straight jacket for my friend when a large raindrop hits the top of my head. Plop!

I am suddenly and acutely aware of the squishy mud under my feet as my toes curl into a fetal position. I reach down to scratch the Ringworm itch that has not yet developed, but probably will. Silvery drops of rain spangle from palm fronds just as a tiny piece of sun sneaks between the droopy live oak limbs to say hello. Somewhere off in the distance, a gull squawks, a puppy barks.

I tear myself away from this august alignment of nature, albeit reluctantly, in order that I might give Big Ed an answer to his question relating mud puddles to feeling like a child.

"No! It doesn't make me feel four-years-old, but this does!" My bare foot lifts up and out of the slimy goo as I haul off and kick muddy water all over him.

He cackles and boots it back at me, and we keep this up until both of us are soaking wet and squealing with laughter like a couple of kids. A couple of four-year-old kids.

When heavy rains come and cause deep puddles to form, some few grownup children can be found wading and splashing, intent on making their corner of the world a little less serious for a while. They have learned that storms pass and lightning is not always scary.