Rain

THE CHANGING of seasons can be especially welcome when life has not been going very well. Because the best fact pertaining to hard times is this: Things change. New seasons are solid reassurance of just how deeply rooted this fact is. Some places have four true seasons, but California really just has the one great switch, sun to rain and back again. Where I grew up, in the desert, the rain part wasn't much. Maybe that's why rain does not carry, for me, the gloomy associations it does for many.

I miss rain now just as much as I miss sun each February. It's October and hot. My spine didn't quite work well enough this summer for my garden care to compete with four months of pure Cali sunshine. The south-facing slope is Riverside-baked. Ten-foot cardoon skeleton. Strawberries leaves brown and crisp. Young lavenders are pulling in on themselves. The alyssum is all stem and seed stalks. Even the crabgrass is yellowed, though still cocky as shit. The Gambusia fish in the water garden are sick to death of having to rely on me to treat water for chloramines and add it to their habitat.

The Gambusias are waiting for rain and the plants are waiting and the worms are waiting and the dusty car is waiting and I am waiting for rain.

We humans can only be briefly in love with the feel of rain. It is exhilarating for a few dozen drops (more if you are in The Notebook or East of Eden), but irritating after that.

But the smell of rain! Ah! What is it? Is it made in the atmosphere or does it result from drops contacting the stuff of Earth? Is it an earthy smell or, like Steinbeck says, "the sweet odor of ozone"? How much of it can be replicated watering a dry yard? This would be a good test.

And the sound of rain! Really an orchestra of sounds: water drop percussion on every exposed surface. Floppy drumming on calla leaves, soft and absorptive concrete contact, pattering on windows while you sleep.

You can grow tired of rain--or sun, or snow. But a force of nature you haven't experienced in a while has magic. No point trying to remember what it felt like to be sick of rain, and longing for sun.

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