And then comes rain says Elisa, magical rain.
As I read her post on FB and look at the picture that accompanies it I can’t help speaking out loud:
Try London in February, you’d not be thinking magical at fucking all, there’s buckets of the bloody stuff teeming down day after day, there’s no magic there.
Only she can’t hear me of course I’m talking to myself because Elisa is in Mexico on the Pacific coast and it’s sunbaked there. For her a rain shower when the average daytime temperature is 25 degrees is indeed magical. For me on the other hand February rain in London is more like a shower of needles, a brutal, cold & unforgiving kind of magic.
The following morning I wake from fitful slumber, it’s pitch black in my rooftop bedroom and disorientated in that moment of wakefulness when one has to check and adjust & work out if you are in a dream or awake a sound is filling my ears, it takes a while to recognise it.
Rain drops are battering the slate roof, the cadence and volume are comforting, like a long remembered history, though its dark I know exactly the size of those raindrops, how quickly they fall, how high they bounce back after hitting the tiles. How the raindrops will be meandering down the window pane hidden by the darkness and the blinds that cover the window.
I pull the duvet up to my nose and just lie there, wrapped in feathers as I listen to the patter of the rain on slate & feel the magic. This feeling is a remembrance I’m certain, the utter comfort of the moment, I’ve felt it before this same moment of magic sheltered from rain. But when?
I trawl through my memories trying to find that first remembrance of sheltering from rain but it’s nowhere to be found, instead more recent encounters rise to the fore, at a roadside cafe in Goa when an unseasonal downpour worthy of any monsoon descends from the skies. Watching as the roadway turned in moments to a river, or riding into Spain over the Pyrenees on a mountain bike and being caught out in the open in an epic rainstorm, soaked to the skin, a freezing cold drowned rat of a man eventually reaching a little mountain village with a bar and a log fire. Soggy socks like steaming kettles drying by the hearth. Or that glorious smell I’ve so rarely found, when hot dry earth meets rain and after the melding of the two once rain departs the glorious scent that rises from the earth. the petrichor. Perhaps there is magic in the rain after all, you just have to search it out.
fiftyfreeandsingle 