Happy to be Rained Out

The rain has finally come. My poor plants are so relieved. A few of them had almost given up, but now that their thirst has been quenched they are much happier. The timing could have been better for me, since it moved our dinner party off the patio and in to the dining room Tuesday night and forced me to re-schedule dropping off a car load of items for work not once but twice. Still, in Florida, you can't ever complain when the rain comes. No matter what.

I can remember as a child that throughout the long summers, you'd have a monsoon every afternoon at 3:00. You could almost set your watch by it. Or at least we said you could. At five till three the dark clouds would suddenly move over and within minutes the skies would just open up. And for fifteen minutes or so it would feel like God had upended buckets over you as the rain just poured down. Hail might very well fall. And then it would be over. The day would be a few degrees cooler, and the humidity would certainly be lower. The plants would be revived and the world would go back to what it was doing. My sister and I would go out in to the front street, a low lying street, to jump in the puddles. If we weren't already out there dancing in the rain, that is. (Some days, the days with lightning and hail, that wasn't allowed, of course. But on the days when the storm wasn't quite so fierce it was a warm rain, and a relief from the sticky heat of the afternoon, that we reveled in.)

We still get monosoons, of course, but its been several years since we've had a summer with the regular afternoon rains. I'm sure if I look someone, somewhere has an opinion of why. And I'm sure it relates to human activities. But, right now, I'm just pleased to be waking up every morning to a weather report that tells me there's a 50 to 60% chance of afternoon rains. They aren't the afternoon rains of the summer season, really, because they are much gentler (comparatively) and lasting in to the evening. It doesn't matter. Every afternoon, as the storm blows in, I sigh a little breath of relief and think hopefully of the afternoon rains of my memory. Maybe this summer will be the year they return?