A LOVE OF RAIN

    I love rain.  I come from a city in Southern California where it hardly ever rains, a place of tumbleweed and sagebrush, dry, crumbling granite and sun-baked, hard-packed earth.

   I used to yearn for rain at Christmas. Snow, of course, was a forlorn hope. Though I do remember one amazing January day when it grew bitterly cold and a vague dusting of powder finer than dandruff began to descend from the skies (it melted way before it reached the ground and never fell again), our winters were generally sunny and warm. If we got cloudy skies on Christmas Day, that was more than satisfactory, but if it actually rained, my heart soared.

   When it rained in springtime, my father was thrilled, thinking of one less chore to do and lower-than-usual water bills. When it rained in the summer, my sisters and I would bolt outside with our faces turned upwards and our mouths open, just like they do in India during monsoon. I didn’t own an umbrella until I was seventeen years old.

   It started getting warm in February, and by March it was already uncomfortable in the afternoons. By April, the mid-day heat was blast-furnace strength. Air-conditioning, which began to appear in middle-class homes in the sixties, wasn’t so much a luxury as a priority by the seventies.

   In the school playground, I sought the shade. I would stand, scuffing at the gravel and decomposed granite, exhausted by the heat and utterly miserable. Other children would race about even on the hottest days, playing softball, dodge-ball and four square, skipping rope and rushing energetically through games of hopscotch while I huddled in the shadows and panted.

   At home I pored over pictures of places like New Zealand and Scotland in the National Geographic. There were photographs of farmers in Wellington boots herding sheep in grassy fields, the rain coursing down their backs. Of people with umbrellas walking past wet brick buildings, the pavement shiny with rain.  Waterfalls cascaded down misty green mountains into roaring, frothing rivers. Rain belted down on row after row of terraced houses and soaked into the ground of moors and fields. To me, parched and dry and bored to death with the heat, it all looked like heaven.

   When I was ten, we took a trip to San Francisco one summer. It was cold and cloudy even though it was summer and it rained almost the entire time we were there. I was in my element, quite literally. My parents and sisters hated it. ‘Too much rain!’ my father complained after the first two days. He’d been happy enough with it at first – even envious:  ‘Save themselves a bundle not having to water everyday,’ he’d commented approvingly. But after two days he’d had enough and so had everybody else. I hadn’t. I told everyone I was going to move to San Francisco as soon I got out of high school. My sisters laughed at me and my parents smiled knowingly at each other, but seven years later I moved to San Francisco and never looked back.

   Since leaving home I have lived in a series of rainy places:  Florida, Japan, Wales, and now Scotland. I miss California: I miss my friends and family and Mexican food. But I never miss the heat. ‘I’ll bet you’ve had enough rain now!’ my sisters always crow, when I describe the weather where I live. But the truth is, I’ve had nowhere near enough.

   My first rainy season in Japan was, by all accounts, the driest one they’d had in over sixty years. Rain pelted down every other day. All the rush-mat flooring in my tiny apartment moulded over, and the grass in my neighbors’ gardens grew thick and lush. Gardenias peeked out from glossy wet petals and sent their buttery, warm fragrance into the sultry summer air. Blue and purple hydrangeas grew cool round heads and cicadas began their first tentative chorus.

   ‘What’s your favorite season here?’ I was often asked. Autumn and Spring are common favorites in Japan: cherry blossoms are so nationally admired they’re a cliché, and everyone loves fall colors. But after seventeen years in Japan, the season I always looked forward to the most was the rainy season with its lush greens and the music of the rain on the rooftops. Most people assumed I was joking, but even that first arguably dry rainy season is one that I still remember with joy and pleasure: the za-za-zaa sound the rain made as it came down in silver grey sheets on the corrugated aluminium siding outside my apartment had a particularly tranquillizing effect.

   After I got married, I moved from Tokyo to Cardiff. Everyone who had ever been to Wales assured me that no matter how much I loved rain, I’d get sick of it there. ‘It just never stops,’ they told me. I did my best not to look smug. They were right: it really does rain a lot in Wales. It is a cold, light, almost endlessly present rain rather than the theatrical stop-and-go rain of Japan, but I never once got tired of it.

  We lived in a miner’s cottage overlooking the Rhondda Valley. In the morning, the rain drew across the green sheep-dotted hills like a ragged stretched-out lace curtain. It drummed down on the rows of miners’ cottages that radiated in semi-circles around our little town, on the stretches of sheep-dotted green fields that formed the other side of the valley, on the great slag heaps behind us. Day in and day out it rained, with the odd break, throughout the year and a half that we were there.

   ‘Where are you from?’ the neighbors would ask me. ‘What are you doing here?’ they would always demand when I told them. ‘Why trade paradise for Wales?’ In time, I learned that the correct response to this was a smile and a shrug, and not the truth. No one believed me when I told them that I found California far from paradise, so I just left them with their fantasies and enjoyed my own bit of reality.

   I now live in Scotland. Whole weeks go by here without a hint of sunshine. That is fine with me. ‘Miserable weather,’ people comment to each other as they pass on the streets. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ I always lie, wanting to shout with joy. I remember my ten-year-old self in the dusty, dry playground, scuffing at the sand. Jogging miserably around the high school sports field in 103-degree weather. I picture myself gasping for breath in my room, poring over National Geographics, gazing longingly at those farmers in their wellies out in their soggy fields. I am living in the land of my dreams!

   When the sun does come out, I make full use of it. I hang out my washing and haul out blankets and quilts to air. I open up all the windows and let the warm breezes blow through the house. Here in the U.K. I have finally learned to appreciate sunshine, to savor it. Because I know that by the time I’ve gotten tired of it, the rain will be back.