Well now, you’ve asked for a tale, and I reckon the one about the Great Piedmont Precipitation is worth tellin’ from every porch on the street. So, pull up a chair, and I’ll give you the view from young Jasper’s window.

Jasper was the tailor’s apprentice, a young man with a quick needle and a quiet heart. He spent his days in a room full of brown wool and navy serge, but his mind was full of rainbows he’d only ever read about in books. Piedmont was a fine town, mind you, but for a fellow of Jasper’s particular disposition, it was like wearin’ a shoe two sizes too small. He felt his own tune was the only one of its kind for a hundred miles.

That Tuesday started as dull as any other. Jasper was letting out the waist on another pair of Mr. Watson’s trousers, his mind a thousand miles from Alabama, when he heard the first whistle. It was a queer sound, like a teakettle singin’ a farewell aria.

Then came the thud.

He rushed to the window, expecting to see a dropped flour sack. What he saw was a man, picking himself up out of the petunia bed next to the library. He was dressed head to toe in what could only be described as leather finery, and he had a mustache so perfectly waxed you could see the gleam from across the street. He brushed the dirt from his chaps, looked around, and said, to no one in particular, “Well, this isn’t the San Francisco Eagle.”

Before Jasper could even process this, another one landed. This one tumbled gracefully in the town square, a vision in a sheer, purple tunic, his hair a riot of curls. He sprang to his feet, struck a pose, and declared, “My wig! The humidity here is criminal!”

Then another. And another. A carpenter with arms like tree trunks and a smile that could charm a bird from a tree. A poet in a velvet waistcoat, clutching a waterlogged sonnet. A dancer who, upon landing, immediately did a pirouette to assess the structural integrity of the main street.

It wasn’t raining men. It was raining his men.

The rest of the town saw a calamity. Jasper saw the grandest costume party ever thrown, and he hadn’t even needed an invitation. He watched, his heart thumpin’ a wild, joyous rhythm against his ribs, as the most astonishing collection of gentlemen he’d ever seen—each more colorful and confident than the last—descended upon his drab little town.

He saw Ol’ Man Bell get splashed by the accountant, but he also saw the way the man in the leather vest winked at the carpenter as they both dusted themselves off. He saw the Bavarian baker land in the peas, but he also saw the baker blush when the dancer helped him up, callin’ him a “delicious fallen strudel.”

The town loafers were categorizin’ them by profession, but Jasper was catalogin’ them by spirit. Here, finally, was the chorus to his lonely song.

He didn’t hesitate. He threw open his door and marched into the chaos, his own plain cotton shirt feeling suddenly like a flag of surrender. He went straight to the man with the mustache, who was inspecting a scratch on his boot.

“Excuse me, sir,” Jasper said, his voice only trembling a little. “You mentioned the Eagle. I believe it’s a bar in San Francisco?”

The man looked him up and down, not with judgment, but with a keen, appraising eye. “It is, darling. A long way from here.”

“I have a map inside,” Jasper said, the boldest words he’d ever spoken. “And a pot of coffee. It might help you get your bearings.”

The man’s stern face broke into a brilliant smile. “Lead the way, sugar.”

And so, while the rest of Piedmont fretted about the structural damage to roofs and the peculiarity of it all, Jasper’s little tailor shop became a sanctuary. It was filled with laughter and stories of places where a man could hold another man’s hand on the street. They drank his coffee, admired his stitching, and for the first time in his life, Jasper didn’t feel like a solitary, strange bird. He was just another feather in a flock he hadn’t known was flying.

They all left, of course. The sky cleared, and the carnival moved on. But the fella in the leather vest, whose name was Victor, stayed for three days. He didn’t just give Jasper a map; he drew a new one on his heart, with routes to freedom and dots for cities where the lights were as bright as the company.

When Victor finally left to catch up with the others, Jasper wasn’t sad. He stood on the porch, watching him go, and he felt the world had shrunk to a manageable size. The rain hadn’t been a freak of nature; it had been a delivery. A sign that his kind of people weren’t just in storybooks, they were out there, falling from the sky and winking in the afternoon sun. And he knew, deep in his bones, that he wouldn’t be the tailor’s apprentice in Piedmont forever. He had a map now, and a destination, and the memory of a Tuesday when the sky, for one glorious hour, was as queer as he was.

*****

And, you know I couldn’t possibly neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays, a very nice Christmas stocking stuffer, is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.