Well-Remembered Rain

I’m thinking rain. A gentle wetness much needed here, like fine lines in a Hiroshige woodcut, umbrellas opening like wildflowers. A drizzle, not a deluge like that afternoon in Delft with the ghost of Vermeer, catching the glisten on a rooftop. There is a drop congealed on a tulip; the same one he captured as a pearl earring.

Rain sufficient to extinguish embers, to quench a parched brushland. Let the topsoil slurp, not drench, nothing torrential to create mud rivers. Save the heavy downpour for the Sierras, turned to flakes. Turned to drifts. Let snow fall on cedar like petals shook loose from cherry trees. Bring on the northern blizzards and give it four months to melt filling our spigots and hydrants, to irrigate the almonds and grapes.

I’m remembering the rain in Albany, relentless in sheets, how Peggy and I sloshed our way into a restaurant, sat by the fire celebrating our willingness to be lucky and how we ended each other’s drought.

How it rained in that seaside town in France we’ll never forget whose name we could never remember. We watched from our window the Atlantic churning against rocks going to pebbles. In the aftermath we walked under a wheel of gulls and a carbonated night sky. Waves found their own insistent music. We took that rhythm inside, going from Beethoven’s 5th to a Chopin adagio.

Precipitation in movies ranges from dark and stormy nights to that other cliché of funereal showers, black suits, black sky. Steady rain with a jazzy sax sets the mood in shadowy noir films. The goon is across the street holding up the lamp post. Everything is going against the guy in the trench coat including the elements. Then there is the rain of renewal, a secular baptismal washing away that old, crusted version and a new self, emerges. My wish is for the joy of rain as if drinking it; Gene Kelly prancing in puddles with his partner, that umbrella, iconically singing his heart out.