rabidsamfan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rabidsamfan) wrote2007-10-11 06:44 pm
rabidsamfan) wrote2007-10-11 06:44 pm
Entry tags:
Rain
There will come soft rains...
There are times when I am reminded once again that I was born and raised on the other side of the dry line. Tonight is one of them.
As an adolescent discovering Sara Teasdale via Ray Bradbury, and getting sappy over O Western Wind with its talk of "small rains", I never really knew what I was reading about. I lived in Denver, land of the the three o'clock thundershower. To me, rain was something that only happened when a bunch of water molecules huddled together for courage and then dashed to the ground as fast as possible -- probably to avoid evaporating before they reached the surface.
I'd seen mist -- honest I had! Drive high enough up in the hills and sooner or later you'll come across a cloud which hasn't got the sense to avoid getting pinned on a few pine trees near a mountaintop. But mountaintop mist is a pale and wispy thing indeed. Chilly. Damp. It hardly ever pretends to be rain, and it nearly never tries to creep down the back of your neck without warning. When Sally Watson, in Poor Felicity had one of the characters say that even if it was raining, it wasn't the wet kind of rain, I nodded, but I did not comprehend.
I live in Boston now.
In Boston, fog is a regular visitor. A couple of weeks ago we had a fog saunter in off the ocean in eighty degree weather. Took downtown and hid it under a wall of white that you couldn't see through from a quarter of a mile away, and spun out pseudopods of slightly less well organized cloudstuff that looked like quilt batting after a dedicated attack by a roving band of caffeinated kittens.
In spring and autumn the clouds show up and stick around for the day. None of the, "let's rain and get it over with" of my childhood. Noooo, first we get the looming and then we get the glooming, and then the fog settles down grey and self-satisfied for the day. Forget little cat feet -- fogs around here are long-haired persians with first dibs on the couch and a disdainful stare for anyone that tries to dislodge them. So you spend the day saying "what's it doing out there?" and "is it actually raining yet?" and then, just when you think it's safe to go home from work without an umbrella, the wandering aquifer that has spent the day keeping daylight at bay cracks its knuckles and really gets to work.
First, the water molecules which have been passing the time of day desultorily decide to form tiny coalitions, only visible to the human eye because of the way they dance and scatter like warm snowflakes in the light from the streetlights. You can't call these things raindrops. Raindrops actually fall, and these prototype puddles haven't got the knack of that yet. They swoop and swarm and swirl, skirting minor obstructions like umbrellas with ease.
If you've got any kind of natural curl in your hair, you can feel it starting to spring up off your neck and head. Bare skin is caressed -- this is soft rain indeed! -- and for a wide-eyed Westerner like me there's even a kind of wonderment in the feeling that you're standing at the edge of cloud and rain and you haven't left the ground. Who needs an umbrella in a snowglobe?
Alas, like another character in Watson's book, you soon realize that there's no such thing as rain that isn't the wet kind -- usually about the time that enough moisture collects on your hair to send a cold rivulet down your collar. It's soon time to go inside and towel off your head and drink some tea to warm up the tip of your nose.
And if you're lucky, perhaps, to remember other rains, the rains of your childhood, gullywashers and sunshiny showers, to remember sitting at the window racing raindrops down the glass with your siblings as you waited for the clouds to clear. Enough blue for a dutchman's britches, my grandmother said, that was all we needed to know that the rain was going to go away.
But it always comes again.
There are times when I am reminded once again that I was born and raised on the other side of the dry line. Tonight is one of them.
As an adolescent discovering Sara Teasdale via Ray Bradbury, and getting sappy over O Western Wind with its talk of "small rains", I never really knew what I was reading about. I lived in Denver, land of the the three o'clock thundershower. To me, rain was something that only happened when a bunch of water molecules huddled together for courage and then dashed to the ground as fast as possible -- probably to avoid evaporating before they reached the surface.
I'd seen mist -- honest I had! Drive high enough up in the hills and sooner or later you'll come across a cloud which hasn't got the sense to avoid getting pinned on a few pine trees near a mountaintop. But mountaintop mist is a pale and wispy thing indeed. Chilly. Damp. It hardly ever pretends to be rain, and it nearly never tries to creep down the back of your neck without warning. When Sally Watson, in Poor Felicity had one of the characters say that even if it was raining, it wasn't the wet kind of rain, I nodded, but I did not comprehend.
I live in Boston now.
In Boston, fog is a regular visitor. A couple of weeks ago we had a fog saunter in off the ocean in eighty degree weather. Took downtown and hid it under a wall of white that you couldn't see through from a quarter of a mile away, and spun out pseudopods of slightly less well organized cloudstuff that looked like quilt batting after a dedicated attack by a roving band of caffeinated kittens.
In spring and autumn the clouds show up and stick around for the day. None of the, "let's rain and get it over with" of my childhood. Noooo, first we get the looming and then we get the glooming, and then the fog settles down grey and self-satisfied for the day. Forget little cat feet -- fogs around here are long-haired persians with first dibs on the couch and a disdainful stare for anyone that tries to dislodge them. So you spend the day saying "what's it doing out there?" and "is it actually raining yet?" and then, just when you think it's safe to go home from work without an umbrella, the wandering aquifer that has spent the day keeping daylight at bay cracks its knuckles and really gets to work.
First, the water molecules which have been passing the time of day desultorily decide to form tiny coalitions, only visible to the human eye because of the way they dance and scatter like warm snowflakes in the light from the streetlights. You can't call these things raindrops. Raindrops actually fall, and these prototype puddles haven't got the knack of that yet. They swoop and swarm and swirl, skirting minor obstructions like umbrellas with ease.
If you've got any kind of natural curl in your hair, you can feel it starting to spring up off your neck and head. Bare skin is caressed -- this is soft rain indeed! -- and for a wide-eyed Westerner like me there's even a kind of wonderment in the feeling that you're standing at the edge of cloud and rain and you haven't left the ground. Who needs an umbrella in a snowglobe?
Alas, like another character in Watson's book, you soon realize that there's no such thing as rain that isn't the wet kind -- usually about the time that enough moisture collects on your hair to send a cold rivulet down your collar. It's soon time to go inside and towel off your head and drink some tea to warm up the tip of your nose.
And if you're lucky, perhaps, to remember other rains, the rains of your childhood, gullywashers and sunshiny showers, to remember sitting at the window racing raindrops down the glass with your siblings as you waited for the clouds to clear. Enough blue for a dutchman's britches, my grandmother said, that was all we needed to know that the rain was going to go away.
But it always comes again.
no subject
no subject
no subject
*chuckle*
I live in a place like that now. Definitely the "other side of the dry line".
:)
(I love your descriptions. fogs around here are long-haired persians with first dibs on the couch and a disdainful stare for anyone that tries to dislodge them. Indeed!)
no subject
I like the sort of rain that says "let's rain and get it over with" and most often it's the sort we got, where we lived before or since we've been here.
But I've seen the sort of rain that says "let's see how much damage there is to do before the water runs out!" *THAT* sort of rain I can do without.
no subject
And damn, now I want it to rain. Sunny southern California, where we technically live in a desert and rain is an "omg, wait, did it really rain? everything's dry already!" sort of event, is not likely to have much rain anytime soon. I have sunny southern California sometimes >.>
no subject
Waiting for the autumn rains out here beyond the dry line, still having to water the lawn in October. When we get 'em this year, it will probably be snow.
Fond memories of the three o'clock thunderstorms that dried off and cleared off to starry nights after a Colorado sunset, and driving through a cloud as you went over a pass. Fonder images of Pikes Peak hiding coyly under a puff of cloudbank going, "Mountain? What mountain?" And the definitely unlyrical memories of trying to navigate across Central Texas in the middle of what my Texan calls a 'frog-strangler' downpour and getting fully conversant with the meaning of the phrase "Lord willing and the creek don't rise..."
Always loved that bit in Poor Felicity.
no subject
Heh. What a beautiful post, full of remarkable images that make me smile. And a rainy day, spent in a warm, lamplit room, together with a pot of tea and a good book or DVD - that can be bliss (or with writing, of course).
BTW - I already had the paragraph with that path-that-goes-nowhere completely rewritten, and I have no idea why you didn't get the newest version with my last email. Sent said newest version to you via YIM. Must clear out my files, dammit.
no subject
no subject
no subject