When I was growing up I loved when it rained. Rain meant no banishment to the outdoors in the ridiculously hot summers to play baseball on the dirt. I wasn’t very good and I’m not kidding when I said the field was dirt.
Staying inside meant I could go up to my bottom bunk in the bedroom I shared with my sisters and I could read. I went the library several times a week and, after cooking for my family, I started when I was around ten, or doing homework, I pretty much finished that in school, I could read.
When I lived in Africa rain was exciting. It was loud on the metal roof, but rain meant I didn’t have to hand water my garden with a calabash ladle. We had running water at 4:30 a day for thirty minutes. We’d fill our barrel with shower water and all of the other mud containers that had been fired to make a not particularly beautiful piece of ceramic.
Cooking water. Water to use when you went to the bathroom. Okay, there was no toilet or outhouse. Let’s call it rustic living. Drinking water that we had to boil.
If we overslept we had no water for the day. We never overslept. An African village where everyone sleeps on the roof because it’s too hot inside is never truly quiet enough to keep anyone from oversleeping.
After Africa I walked to the train station in Arlington Heights and took that commute on the Chicago Northwestern. When it rained I still walked from home to the train and then trudged a mile to the ugly corn cob towers on State street. I still hate the smell of a wet wool coat.
The rain in Hawaii usually happened in the late afternoon or in the middle of the night. It cooled things off, made everything dozens of shades of green, and left rainbows to ooh and ah over. I never did find that pot of gold. There were tropical storms and floods and the occasional hurricane that meant downpours and flooding. But that was just island life.
When I worked as a concierge rain meant unhappy tourists, refunds, and smaller paychecks. I used to watch the weather reports to figure out how much my two week check might be since I was on commission. The day I gave notice after an eighteen-month level ten migraine was because of a horrible tourist who did nothing but complain about the rain.
Living in Oshkosh rain is often about my garden. Last year we had to water the bushes and no rain meant a larger water bill. And work. Lots of work in the early morning or long after sunset when things had cooled down.
This year I dread the rain because this is the worst weed year ever. Gary can’t kneel, my eyes have been a problem after two surgeries, and so the weeds have not been pulled.
But yesterday there was no rain. It was a lovely day made better by my new helper. She’s thirteen, wants to earn money, and she loves being outdoors in the garden. She has great knees and she uses her app to see if something is a weed or a plant. And she’s fast.
Yesterday afternoon it rained and it didn’t bother me one bit. She’s coming back to move sedum on Monday with me and if there are weeds she will pull them.
And then there’s my dog. He hates the rain. I always said that if they were casting The Wizard of Oz with dogs Coconut would be the wicked witch just so that he could say, “I’m melting!” when he got water on him. That’s how he acts when it rains outside.
When we go to the dog park after it rains he finds every puddle. Then he gets mad about the inevitable bath that is going to happen because of the mud.
A lifetime of rain.
We bought at least six umbrellas when we moved here. We never, ever use them. We get wet and then we get dry and life goes on with or without the rain.
