To Follow the Rain

A couple weeks ago, Sue posted this on Facebook: one man’s yearning for the yearly constancy of Seattle rain, and how summer is but a warm threat to wet winter nirvana. The Pacific Northwest is, from my provincial lookout camp, the most beautiful place in the world, only second to alpine springtimes. (I have an unfounded fondness for alpine wildflowers.) I have only been to the PNW once, but I don’t consider myself to have gone. Being shepherded onto a rickety tour bus with old Chinese grandparents speaking in tongues I only loosely understand hardly counts as an experiential wonder. Crater Lake has to exist in more than just hastily snapped Kodak prints. It is a living, breathing entity; the next time I go, I want to be with people who breathe it.

I have wanted to go to Washington for awhile now. I want to go because of rain, because rain brings out the best smells. Incense cedars become incense, woodland oaks are acorn soup, dirt and gravel effuse earthiness, even asphalt has its own dusty charm as nature wrestles with man. This coveted petrichor is especially prominent in California, where the wet spells are few and far between.

In Connecticut, I can find neither the fleeting smell of the first rain, for it rains just frequently enough so that the earth has not the time to dry; nor the light humid haze that permanently makes itself part of your home after it has been raining for weeks on end. Instead, we have a thick blanket of humidity the few days leading up to a rainstorm. Then it rains, and the atmosphere releases itself. The air is dry again. The cycle continues.

I have grown to love this fickle rain too. I love the sparse California rain, I love this common Connecticut rain; I want to live and love the continuous Washington rain. I have come to love all flavours of rain that Nature showers us with. I love the film of flat oak leaves that float on puddles; I love taking refuge under the oak from the rain, only to be rained on by shivering leaves (this I love too); I love walking in the rain, perfectly dry under grey nylon and a brown patterned umbrella; I love running in the rain, knowing I will regret being sick later as water cools the nape of my neck; I love the rain because I love.

When one loves another human, she bears the burden of their grievances, of their agonies, of the small things that arouse them into anger. A tear does not come out of one eye, a laugh not from one mouth, a story not from one experience. When one loves, she begins to love what the other loves. My grandfather loves eggplant, so I began to eat and love eggplant. He loves gardening, and so I love backyard gardens. My uncle loves chemistry, and so I began to learn and love chemistry. I have come to love salt and vinegar chips, and laksa, and tartan red, and botanical oddities, and the written word, and the spoken word, and the philosophical word, and organized disorganization, and the Phantom of the Opera because I have loved people who have loved them all. I have even come to love life and to love God and to love myself.

This is why I love the rain as much as I do. I love the rain, I tell myself, because it bridges three thousand miles of country with a few clouds. I believe that the water molecules falling from the overhead cumulonimbus pillows may have been the same dew that condensed on her window while she was sleeping, refracting the morning rays to wake her up. I love the rain because what soaks my shoes is what the terns fly over, what the cormorants fish in, what the orcas swim in, what the red-tails and cattails back home need, what she misses. The thick humidity before a rainstorm feels like breathing gossamer fibres. Maybe if I inhaled enough of it, I would be able to follow the threads within me to all and she whom I love.

My love for anyone cannot be consummated with exploration in physical intimacy; it is the intimate exploration of their physical world that perfects the love. In perfecting one love, I develop infinitely many more, and in developing infinitely many more, I realize how big infinity is and how one love can never be perfected. But I am content not having perfect love. I would rather not be told that infinity is finite. I just want to live where it rains.