It’s been a while, Rain. Too long. You and I go way back. We grew up together. Some of my earliest memories are of you. That time when we had to move my birthday party indoors because you showed up. Or when I was supposed to walk in our town’s annual Corpus Christi procession, decked out in my First Communion dress, flowers in my hair, walking with my classmates in rows of heavenly innocence.
But you wanted to come along.
Marching inside, down the church nave, just wasn’t the same.
I resented you back then. You weighed down all my joys. Trips to the beach, picnics, days out, wet mornings when I would show up at school freezing and soaked to the skin, wishing you would just go away, Rain, go away and come another day.
Even when I couldn’t feel you in the air, still you brooded in the background, lurking in gunmetal clouds on the horizon. Your shadow was always there.
“There’ll be a fine day yet, please God,” my mother would say, grimacing at the grey skies in the middle of August.
Every Summer we hoped, against hope, that you would leave us a while, let us play out for a few hours while the nights were long. We knew it was too much to wish you would stay away in Winter. But in Summer, we hoped that surely you would leave us for a week, at least?
Sometimes you were a blessing, sure. In the Spring, we liked to see you. You were great for the farmers, pushing the grass and crops into lush thickets of life. Cows’ milk got rich off the pasture you created. Crops would get waist-high in the fields.
And yet, as the months grew a little warmer, we longed to see the back of you. To feel dry for just a while.
When I look back now, Rain, I think we hated you because we never had a chance to miss you. No matter the time of year, you hugged our coastline, clung close to us, ever present, never far from spoiling our days.
I used to wish you could be more like Snow. Cool and soft, showing up for a brief time and then disappearing as quickly as you came.
It took me twenty years to miss you, Rain. Twenty years of dodging you, denying you, dreading you. It wasn’t until I moved to California that I finally realized my love for you. I had to get away to see how much you meant to me.
We had four years without you here. You never called, never showed. We heard nothing from you. It seemed like my childhood dreams had come true. At last, you really had gone away, like we asked. But you weren’t coming back another day.
Faces askance, we would search the California skies for you and find nothing but endless blue before us stretching out like eternal life. When we looked at the ground, it was cracked and bare, not a wisp of green to be seen.
That’s when I knew, Rain. I knew I loved you. The soft sound you make as you appear in the night, drumming quietly on the roof. The gentle touch of your raindrops resting on blades of grass. The fresh, thankful smell that rises up from hot ground after you’ve gone.
Thank you, Rain. I wish I had loved you more when I knew you better. Now let’s never leave each other so long ever again.
#WCFeb2018 #rain #California
