La Lluvia

Pronounced “la YU-vi-a”, it is Spanish for the rain. Frequent readers will notice that I have tried to wax rhapsodic about the coming of the rainy season. I don’t think people who live with intermittent rains all year long can really understand what it’s like to go without rain for six months. There is a dryness in the air that, like the polvo (dust) from the road, gets into the very soul. The omnipresent sun, such a blessing, becomes a curse only shade can aleve. There is a reason, I believe, the word arid in English has negative connotations in climate and relationships. The old joke “yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is only a joke told in temperate climates.

Here in the waning days of June, any precipitation is a cause for expectation. Is this it: the end of the dry season, the beginning of the rain? Even the year after a year of record rainfall (when some locals were worried about the potential for flooding because the lake had not receded much and the rainy season was about to begin): yes, even then we welcomed the advent of the rains.

In the temperate world, rain requires context. A drenching rain in summer cools off the land, while the cold rains of Spring are a plague (ask me about my Camino!). Rain in the winter yields the careful calculation of the freezing point. In the workaday world, rain meant accidents and delays on crowded highways. Rain on a long run might be acceptable, but rain on a picnic: no.

Here it is different. Rain changes everything, and heralds the best time of the year. During the dry season, water your plants everyday or they die, unless you choose (like me) to plant succulents native to this high desert plateau. During the rainy season, water the garden mañana. The extra fine coating of dust which nightly overlays your terracotta tile floor, suggesting an ice rink, magically disappears. The strategic positioning of curtains–to block the relentless sun–and fans–to promote circulation–are suddenly unnecessary. Each evening, clouds do the blocking and winds whip up (whence tonight?) to clear the air.

Then the rain: cooling, thunderous, at times horizontal and changing cardinal directions at a moment’s notice. And of course the freshness that is everywhere after a good hard rain. When we first moved here, I would scurry to close the windows from the capricious rain. Then I realized that the water just collects on the tile, and you brush it out the door or let it dry and so what?

It is saddening that the snowbirds who overwinter here in Mexico mostly miss the rainy season. The transition period, when our flora move from Phoenix to Honolulu, when the temperature briefly flirts with too hot before settling into wonderful, and the sun passes from scorching to friendly: that is what makes some call it paradise.

The Ides of June are well past, so we’ll have no early start to the rainy season. But start it will. It rained once last week, and then again two nights back. And now again last night. There is something different in the air, and it is as welcome as an old friend.