As I write this, the Hill Country town where I grew up and where I live again is in the midst of a long span of rain. We’ve had close to a week of it at this point, and we’re in for at least a few days more–and while a good rain is always welcome, it’d be nice to get a few things to dry out just a bit. As it is, mowing my yard’s going to be a two-and-a-half-hour job, and I’m far enough out of shape that I’ll not be good for much else on the day I do it. (That is my problem, though, not the rain’s.) More rain’s going to make it more of an annoyance, even if we still need it to replenish the aquifer and clean out the rivers and creeks around here.
The picture is mine.
Rain here is a strange thing. In the full summer–and what we tend to have in late July and through August is a different thing than in May and June or September and October, while even our “winters” tend to be like the springs and even summers of other places I have lived–when rain comes, it comes in a fury, dumping flooding waters for twenty minutes or so and then stopping dead, allowing the wet ground to dry and make the air moist and heavy, while not doing much to keep the temperatures low. (Indeed, days of 90°+ temperatures and 90%+ humidity are not uncommon here, though not as pervasive as in southwest Louisiana, to be sure.) The kind of rain we’ve been getting, mostly light but punctuated emphatically with shortish spans of torrent from the sky, is more like what we get in winter–though it is far warmer, leaving things feeling like nothing so much as a bathroom half an hour after a shower. Drivers are driving worse, and peoples’ spirits seem dampened along with their clothes and just about everything else.
For me, though, the rain is usually something different. I drive decently well in it–or I think so, anyway, as much as I ever do. And I tend to have an easier time writing when water is falling from the sky outside. Leaving aside horrible dirty jokes rooted in ideas of Ouranous and Gaea–how else is Mother Earth impregnated?–I am often better able to think when the sky is grey and clouds descend to the ground in small, small bits. I usually sleep better, too, though I am given to understand such is the case for a lot of people. I am, I suppose, supposed to be where there is rain–not because I am so lugubrious as that, and hopefully not because I somehow accept that my place in the world is being pissed upon or subjected to the assaults of other fluids.
Or something like that.
Elliott RWI 