Spring Rain

For the entirety of my life, I have adored the rain. It's so emotive. So crisp and sprightly, or mournful, or angry. Rain has a personality all its own. Of course, because I grew up in a town that gets three hundred days of sunlight out of the year, every year, I was never well-acquainted with rain as a child - and so naturally, I have always loved it to bits. Whenever it would rain, I would be outside (with my mother yelling about pneumonia) playing in its warm wetness, getting soaked to the bone and muddy and wallowing in the unadulterated joy that is a good bout of rain.

Naturally, I was excited about being in British Columbia for school, right on the coast. It would rain so much more - how perfect! Could I imagine a better scenario? Not really. The abundance of green, the wetness, the comparative warmth in winter and cool in summer...I couldn't wait to get here.

Well, I've been here since September. It rains inordinately. And up until today, I could not bring myself to be joyful about the rain. Happy, yes. Apathetic, usually. Downright disenchanted, once or twice. But today I realized what it is that makes rain special.

The smell.

Now you're like, "Well, duh, Kate. Jeez. Really? How long did it take you to notice that? Haven't you just been marinating in that for the past seven months?" You would think that, wouldn't you? But I haven't. The smell that means rain and rings so strongly in my heart with glee is not a product of the water falling out of the sky; rather, it is a chemical emitted by deciduous leaves. And around here, during fall and winter, despite the fact that there are manifold plants that retain their green casing all year round, the deciduous among us are only in leaf from March to October. Today was the first day that I could smell the rain. And so now, I want to sink my hands into the black soil and bury my toes in a garden, soak up sunlight through my face and arms and back and breathe nothing but spring rain, from here until June.

Kate

PS: Think the Greeks and Romans were the only ones concerned about meter in their works? English is actually a heavily meter driven language. Here, let me show you: take the phrase soak up sunlight through my face and arms and back and breathe nothing but spring rain, from here until June, and say it. It starts out iambic: a stressed/unstressed pattern of word pairs (in English, stress is shown with a slightly raised pitch, volume and a greater length, whereas in Latin, stress is shown with length, at least in poetry), followed by a series of dactyls (long-short-short). Thus, it's sort of like: S U S U S U S U S U S U S S U U S U U S U U S (X). The change in meter will probably lend more emphasis to the phrase nothing but spring rain, from here until June. And you can't insert a longer month for June because that breaks the meter. Interesting, no? ...I thought not. Aww. And I try so hard to be cool...