It’s raining again. Sitting in a dark house, with stone walls and large timber framing that reaches from wall to wall, exposed. There’s rain outside, pittering and pattering against the old windows, gentle streams of falling water flowing over and off the porch roof. It’s light out, but not entirely light, dusk maybe. It isn’t dawn, that’s for sure, but it looks like dawn, because our mood is very different at each time, but dusk and dawn always look the same. The hills outside the windows are misty and green, the sky gray, but warm. The fire inside crackles and warms the stone hearth. We have a hot cup of coffee, a thick plaid blanket, and a comfortable chair. Lamp light is nice. It’s raining, gently, rhythmically, necessarily.
This rain is nothing like that rain.
This rain falls in the way that lead pellets fall from the barrel of a just fired 12 gauge. It has been blasted from the sky, repeatedly, sometime straight down, other times sideways, pushed with the wind that howls through these buildings and over these trees. This rain is an angry rain, a cold rain, the sort that feels like it would surely kill us if we were left out in it for too long.
It’s raining today, now, as it did last night, for the length of it. There is rain in the forecast today, too. Then some more tomorrow, and Wednesday and then Thursday and I’m assuming Friday and Saturday and probably Sunday. It’s raining like crazy, and while we switched seasons some time ago we really just turned our white precipitation clear, and we turned those February lows into April lows. It would be easy to look out today, and this blowing rain, and think that we have not come all that far.
But we have. We have turned away winter. We have beaten the snow, the ice, and we have turned mostly brown into mostly green. We are losing the battle this week, but the war has already been won. This is just clearing out the last pockets of resistance, and 43 with wind and clouds has proven a stubborn enemy, yes, but it cannot last either.
There is an alternative to this rain and this cold, and it’s cold and sun. Cold and sunny with gale winds is no more fun than cold and rain with gale winds. In fact, I think cold and rainy is more versatile than cold and sunny. If it’s cold and sunny we’ll feel some forced need to go out and do something under that sun. We’ll rake some remaining leaves, prune some renegade shrubs, caulk this or paint that. Cold and rain doesn’t allow any of that, and I’d prefer a Sunday like the one past, when I didn’t feel any particular need to do anything particularly productive.
If it weren’t for this rain, we wouldn’t have all this green. If it weren’t for these showers we couldn’t have our flowers. Rain is annoying, and the people in this coffee shop this morning have been keen on announcing that each time they hustle in from the damp. They walk in, shaking and scared, as if they have just been thrown down a mountain river and escaped only by clinging to a lifesaving branch until help came. Another one just told the counter girl that it’s really raining outside. As if the windows weren’t clear.
Without rain, we would have drought. Drought in the spring is especially difficult, as it leaves our buds dry and our grass weak. Without spring rain, our lakes that are really just drainage ponds wouldn’t have enough water to make their owners feel content in their bad decision. Without all this rain, we couldn’t wash the last bits of salt from our streets. Without this rain, our corn and soybeans wouldn’t be germinating as they should, which would make commodities traders push their prices high. I like this rain because I like $3.99 boxes of cereal.
So today, let’s just enjoy the rain. Tomorrow, let’s enjoy it, too. Besides, my boat still isn’t in, and without it I have no particular use for sunshine.