Rain

Do you think about rain? Do you ever worry about it or miss it when it isn’t directly related to your personal discomfort? Do you use hating it as a conversational inroad or bandaid for an awkward too-long look at a stranger? 

As a person who grew up mostly in western Washington State (and occasionally northwestern Oregon) I often find myself missing that specific, seemingly omnipresent grey-blue almost-mist that absorbs into you like you're a hapless piece of chalk, no matter what you are bundled up in. You’d have to wear an entire living orca over your body not to feel it; it’s a needle-y rain. It changes your body temperature. It makes being poor extra cold (it feels way colder than anywhere I’ve ever been save Manitoba in mid-February), it makes winter extra goth with its foggy veiling and summer an extra tender, alternatively non-tropical gift. Oh, low ceiling, how I love you. 

I’ve lived all over the U.S. and some of Canada and I’ve been fortunate enough to travel all over the world on the coattails of music, and the most dramatic differences I notice from place to place are the never-ending varieties of rainfall! Towering thunderheads that start on the Great Plains make man-made monuments look like punishable jokes. How puny, and stupid, how embarrassing Mount Rushmore is! I want that anvil cloud to end it once and for all! The clouds get bigger and bigger until they can’t control their own size and rage, and just when that isn’t crazy enough they blast head-on into rising banks of moist Midwest air that is already punching upward and together they become braiding explosive titans that smash, splinter, bruise and obliterate where they touch down to us. Those kind of skies make me wonder why we need to ever specify something is “supernatural”? 

Nature and its doings are already the zenith! Nine-tenths of it are beyond the realm of scientific understanding and explanation! Nature is big-budget and shocking!  “Natural” is getting your first period! “Natural” is Guinea worms coming out of the bottoms of your feet! “Natural” is bioluminescence and volcanoes! “Natural” is head lice! Anyway... anyone who has ever lived though a summer in Chicago would tell you that the occasional torrential dousing that blows in and bulldozes the crushing humidity off the streets and into the lake is nothing to complain about. It's straight-up defribillatory! I’m sure that’s not a word but it is a very real feeling!  The musical summer downpours also seem to be the only thing that impress the cicadas enough to make them go quiet (I don’t doubt it’s reverential...) 

In the desert Southwest all living things pause for the big, fat dust-exploding drops announcing monsoons that are sometimes flanked by deadly microbursts and flooding that blast through the washes and manmade cement underpasses as a wall of water and dangerous debris; from mud and sticks to trees and abandoned shopping carts, it animates everything in its path all at lightning speed. All the animals who live in these usually dry waterways and use them as their great highway system park up in your bushes for the duration. I’ve had a lot of really awkward moments with coyotes at arms-length. The water shows colors that were right under our noses all along as incandescent flashing fish swimming over the land. Then, sometimes in ten minutes or less, the shower lifts off as a wisp of dragonflies and we all breathe in through our pores and noses and mouths to smell the cleanest most purifying smell on earth; creosote bushes with their tiny cotton buds dampened, distilling the rainwater into a hydrosol spell I can’t describe. My heart half-breaks for some other sepia world when I inhale it. It smells like looking at an old monochromatic photo through a heavy horn-rimmed magnifier and noticing for the first time, at the deep end of syrupy beetle-varnish brown it drops off so swiftly and seamlessly into black, and there, at the very knife edge of the perfect velvet darkness is a faint lichen green where the minerals cling to the paper with their elemental burrs. I am always disappointed that my human olfactory unit can’t maintain that smell in concentration, like to gorge on it or drown myself in hoarded bucket after bucket of that non-memory sensation... to swirl around in it and coat the crystal bowl of the snifter backlit by the fire and become so amber, like you’re back inside a mother. Nothing bad has happened yet but it feels like you can rest awhile before the loss comes. Ugh! Rain is a very gifted storyteller and it never dumbs it down or pulls a punch to make it easier on you. I could go on about rain (and have!) in other places too, but this column is too short for my gesticulating body-poetry. 

What I’m frothing at is basically this: rain is more honest than the truth which is why it’s the thing I want/need/trust next to me while I sleep, on my nightstand every night of my life, as have the entire human race BC and AD.. what a relationship! Water is a universal right for the sentient and non and now, sadly, it is a privilege. So the motto on my solo family crest is that rain is my essential friend and companion and I shall never complain about it.