Earlier this Year
It has been raining so much in the past several months, I no longer pine for the calming murmur and the cool coziness. I’m frankly sick of it. We spent our first ten years here wondering if it ever rained in Southern California. I came to the conclusion that it was a desert in disguise. This whole area felt like a beachside paradise, but make no mistake — arid wasteland is what it was. No matter how much water you pump from the Colorado, if you fail to maintain this place, it will relapse to its lifeless origins. Just like an aging actor dependent on plastic surgeons. What else?
When I came up with these conclusions, I thought everybody was on the same page as me. I was firing up analogies I felt only succeeded in identifying one place on the face of the Earth. But with all these rains we’ve been having, I now bring it up again, asking neighbors and coworkers what the hell happened to all that dry weather? And they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I’m referring to the fact that suddenly we have all this rain — I mean real rain! Like the Miami rain I had grown up with, downpours, endless showers that spilled their abundance into gutters that were not quick enough to collect it all, forcing cars to suddenly hit the breaks so that they wouldn’t release a wall of water when hitting one of these broad puddles. To them — my neighbors and coworkers — it’s as if there were rain here all along.
I was questioning my own recollections, wondering if my point of view of having lived in only places that had a healthy dose of rain throughout the year had shifted my outlook. But I don’t think so. What’s ten years of barely having rain in a place when rain is inconsistent? The natives don’t recognize lapses of ten years because they are used to such pauses. It seems that it comes and goes every few years. Where I was wrong is that I concluded that this place had no other type of weather. What I was not aware of is that we likely arrived when it stopped raining for a spell of so many years, and now things are back to normal. The actual climate here is not temperate or subtropical or anything that sounds familiar; it is simply “unpredictable.”
I’ve always loved the rain, and that might have been because I was never a homeowner. Now that I am, with such spells of days filled with wet misery, I add every possible damage to the house to my growing mob of anxiety. And unpredictable is the type of climate that helps me surf through every worry.