ONE HALF-INCH OF RAIN
September 15th, 2006 admin
All summer, Austin was the hot orange spot on the national weather map. Even at 6 a.m. a humid, moldy smell hung in the air. Every plant on earth stalls dead when it gets over a hundred degrees, but I love to garden, so I moved dirt instead, an utterly absorbing activity. Nevertheless, the thought of a gin-and-tonic began to crowd my thoughts at 4 pm every day and the cocktail hour became a habit as ingrained as tooth-brushing or gossip. By the end of August, it hadn’t rained since the fourth of July.
48 hours ago, at three a.m., I heard it return. Surely everyone has these best-thing-in-life-are free moments-falling in love all over again with stars and clouds-but what I like is rain. Rain is a great promoter of interesting developments.
–When my daughter Coco, not a writer, was in seventh grade, she had Mr. Schneider for English. On one of those drizzly Colorado days that happens about twice a year, he instructed her to go out in the rain and write a poem. In doing this, he busted open a mile-wide vein of romance that had been living in my daughter all her life, and now she is a writer.
–My friend Louise, who didn’t believe in such things, fell in love at first sight with the guy who came to set up her rainwater collection system. Not four months later, on their wedding day, she and Bruce, the magical rainwater guy, planted silver sage, which only blooms in the rain.
–When my other daughter Gus was five, she invented the “rain-bathe”. You slither out of your clothes and prance around on the deck naked until you’re wet enough to deserve a really hot bath. I recommend it.
–The Jack and the Beanstalk story makes perfect sense who you actually see new bean seeds popping out of the ground in response to rain. My Kentucky Wonders are aimed at the sky. And what if The Giant were an immoral 1970s record producer? Another story, I guess.
