Rain Reign: Part I

I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that’s pronounced the same as another word but spelled differently. My homophone name is Rows.

“Making a mistake is accidental. Breaking a rule is deliberate.”

“It’s all right to say ‘homonym’ when we mean ‘homophone.’ That’s called a colloquialism.”

My official diagnosis is high-functioning autism, which some people call Asperger’s syndrome.

Some of the comments are nice, such as the ones about when I participate appropriately in a classroom discussion.

Rain and I have routines. We like routines.

What’s fun about homonyms is hearing a word in a sentence and suddenly realizing that it has a homonym, or maybe two (or three, but that’s so rare that I don’t often think about homonym quartets), and that you haven’t thought of that homonym pair or trio before.

It’s important to have rules, because without them, you could get overwhelmed thinking of words that sound alike.

I put the words peek and peak on my list, but I did not add pique for a trio, because pique is a word of French origin.

A true pair or trio of homonyms includes no contractions. Isle and aisle are on my list, but I didn’t add I'll because it’s actually a contraction of the words I will.

A true pair or trio of homonyms includes no abbreviated words. I did not add ink and inc. to my list because inc. is short for incorporated, which is clearly not a homonym for ink.

Oh, one more fun thing about homonyms: The word pair implies two, but it is part of a homonym trio—pair, pear, and pare.

What Miss Croon meant was that since I was having trouble talking to the other kindergarteners and I cried a lot and was apt to hit myself in the head with a shoe or a picture book if somebody didn’t follow the rules, I might need a special school or program.

By fourth (forth) grade Mrs. Leibler had become my aide (aid). My father said he didn’t think I needed an aide, but that he wasn’t going to fight Hatford Elementary.

“That is very interesting,” I told him, recalling Mrs. Leibler’s conversational tips, “because ‘Hannah’ is a kind of word called a palindrome. That means you can spell it the same way whether you start at the beginning or the end. My name is not a palindrome because if you spell it backwards it’s E-S-O-R, not R-O-S-E. But it does have a homonym.”

“I will name her Rain,” I replied. “You found her in the rain, and rain has two homonyms—reign and rein—so it’s a special word.”

My father’s name is a prime number too. W-E-S-L-E-Y comes out to 89.

At each stop our driver, whose name was Shirley Ringwood, would look at us backward in her big glaring mirror and wait until everyone was sitting down.

There are lots of rules for drivers, and they’re listed clearly in the New York State driver’s manual, but many drivers don’t follow them.

I hear lots of things I’m not supposed to hear, and lots of things nobody else is able to hear, because my hearing is very acute, which is a part of my diagnosis of high-functioning autism.

“I don’t have a pet,” says Flo, whose name is easy to remember because of the homonyms flow and floe.

Mrs. Leibler always says, “Would you like a taste, Rose?” and I always say no because I don’t want to vary my lunch.

“I’m going to look through the box,” I say as Rain reluctantly follows me back to our yard.

The top and bottom are held together by a white satin braid. The braid is fraying, which leads me to believe that the box and the braid are old.

It’s later, when I’m adding Rain’s My Pet dry food to her My Pet wet food, that I turn on the radio and hear the weather forecaster say, “...approaching storm. Hurricane Susan is expected to make landfall in three days” (daze), “and will be of epic proportions, a superstorm that could become the storm of the century.”