A writer in the rain
Vikki Stea
It was an insurance company ad on slick magazine paper. “You’re dead. Now what are you going to do about it?” It went on about leaving your kids money, but I stopped at that first question. I was. Dead. It had happened incrementally, without my noticing until that moment. I got up each morning and went to work, fixed my children meals in the evenings, watched T.V. And all that time I was dead.
And not just me, but thousands, possibly millions of others like me. There was no comfort in numbers; I was still dead.
Could I come back to life? What would it take? And was it worth the tremendous effort? There was a warmth and sluggish content in my present state—why bother? I no longer felt the desire to walk or exercise and liked curling up at one corner of the couch with the remote. I also stubbornly held the job I despised out of inertia and a belief that nothing better existed for me—typical dead thinking.
I was not alive enough to make new friends or start new endeavors or adventures. I had convinced myself that I had to go from one dreary money-making activity to the next. I joined a gym and paid the bill every month for three years without going there.
Death didn’t feel good, but it had stopped being painful. I no longer thrashed and flailed around. I no longer yearned to write. I had joined the mole people digging more and more tunnels for less and less reason—not to get to the light certainly, and not to accomplish some grand scheme, but just because that’s what mole people do.
Back to life. What would that entail? Or, once dead, do I stay this way? I decided to keep a journal and try to rouse from death’s snug embrace. I would chronicle the thing I hated most, the rain, so I could focus on it. I had often said, “It never stops raining,” and when I said it, the rain was always the same in my mind—a never ending fall of cold wet drops under a slate-colored Oregon sky. But if I really looked? If I took the time to write it down, maybe the rain could surprise me.
OCTOBER RAIN
My grandmother let us children put on bathing suits when it rained and run outside and get wet. That was a warm rain during Michigan summers. It felt exhilarating to dance in the rain. But I hate Oregon rain, though I’ve continued to live in it ten straight years, grieving all the while for warmth and sunlight like an absent lover.
I complain about the rain as if my wailing will somehow send the sodden clouds packing. I grew up in Southern California, where rain was an alien guest. There, rain was a novelty, and I had enjoyed the infrequent showers. The drumming sound of rain made me feel more alive. But Oregon rain is not a guest. It moves in and takes over for days, for weeks, for months. The skies are heavy lusterless gray, and the rain, light or heavy, is incessant. You are always wet when outside and few Oregonians bother to carry umbrellas, so their hair is always misted or dripping.
It’s not raining today. Sunlight lit up the windows this morning and lay like a bright cloth on the dining room table. It’s my first day alone in the house without children for months. They’ve gone to visit their grandmother. I have hours to putter and read, to think about creative projects. I feel a few sparks of hope for renewed activity. I still give most of my energy to a job I don’t like, but the rain project has given me an excuse for writing. I need to make a relationship with the rain. Maybe then I won’t feel smothered by it, chilled and immobile, like a slug who has crawled under a fallen leaf.
But the clouds take the sun early afternoon, and the room turns gray. Looking out the window I see a few orange leaves clinging to trees. Winter is nearly here. Oregon’s winter has only a week of snow at most. It’s always gloom and drizzle and damp cold. Mushrooms and moss grow in the front yard. Sometimes the entire house takes on an eerie green glow as if the moss were looming over it. In winter the lawn becomes spongy when the water can no longer percolate down.
NOVEMBER RAIN
The rain is trickling steadily off the roof. On some days it falls in sheets, streaming down the children’s bedroom window on the second floor. Today, it’s the sound of a hose left on. Everything is dripping—the tips of fir trees, porch overhangs, and what’s left of the trumpet vine. There’s a filtered light outside that makes the wet surfaces of concrete and car tops glisten. With more sunlight, the drops would catch fire and sparkle. They would shimmer like the tiny Christmas lights on my neighbor’s tree.
It’s been raining steadily all night, but now, finally there’s a break in the clouds and gravity is pulling all the water back into the earth. If I pay attention, I can hear the sound of draining after the raining.
DECEMBER RAIN
The rain keeps falling. It’s called La Nina this year and the ground can accept no more. Floods again in Mapleton and all along the coast. Houses that were built along the rivers are now in them. Last week we also had a freeze, and pipes burst, flooding living rooms throughout the neighborhood. Today, clouds hang like a steel ceiling. Quiet, dull, dark—barely illuminating the dead crisp leaves on moss covered sidewalks.
The yard is chaotic and depressing. The frost killed the last remaining plants, and they lie on the ground, grotesque and frost burned. I don’t want to go out there in the rain and cold to neaten the gardens. During winter I try not to go out at all.
JANUARY RAIN
Steady and pouring today, with a deep gray/brown gloom. Puddles everywhere growing larger. I won’t leave the house or the car without an umbrella. This is real rain that only looks good at night when bright colored lights reflect through the streaming windshield of a car— it’s then that even red stop lights are beautiful.
Driving, though, is a frightening experience, especially driving fast on the freeway in darkness with little visibility. Heavy spray from other cars continuously covers the front windshield. I’m trying hard to appreciate this rain too.
FEBRUARY RAIN
For months I’ve focused on the rain and seen it change from day to day. I don’t loathe it anymore because I now understand it has variation and nuances. The sound of it can be a patter or a drumming, a plop or a trickling. I don’t love it either because of the cold, sometimes icy gloom. Missing the sun, I slosh through puddles in the grocery store parking lot or climb uphill to the flowerless Rhododendron Garden where tall pine trees and shivering bushes wait patiently. I have no patience, I realize. I want to sit on sun lathered grass that isn’t wet, and I want that now.
MARCH RAIN
My two boys, eight and ten don’t seem to notice the rain. They are like fish in water and accept it as normal without comment or complaint. They’ve never used umbrellas, only rarely pulling up a jacket hood in downpours. The youngest is unhappy when the sun is out in summer. “Too hot,” he says. He’d much prefer to rest on a moss-covered rock like a contented newt enjoying the dampness. Those, like him, who are born under soggy clouds, enjoy this weather. Each morning, I look out the window and yearn for a parting of the cloud cover, sun-thirsty, wanting only a glimpse of a bright ray hitting earth.
When I first arrived in Oregon it was summer, two full months of exquisite dryness, the hot sun turning high grass the color of toast. Blackberries swelled and then ripely beckoned, free for picking. I had sought out waterfalls, lakes and streams entranced by the sounds of water. The greens engulfed me, leaves and bushes in shades of lime, emerald, forest, kelly and sage. Alluring, inviting and deceptive. I didn’t know then that the glory of that first warm, dry summer would be followed by nine months of rain.
APRIL RAIN
The rain has stopped today, but clouds are hanging glum and threatening overhead. The asphalt is damp and the earth squishes if you step on it. A few dogwood blossoms have opened on the tree outside the window, salmon-colored and flat like paper. In a few weeks the tree will blaze with flowers. The lilac bush too is coming to fruition with hard purple buds. This is the time of year I most desire warmth knowing that in a few months the sun will shine through tulips like red and yellow lanterns.
But for now, it continues to rain and the perfume of spring swirls away into the earthy fragrance of wet dirt. I still don’t enjoy it. But I know now that each day is different from any other. And the rain cannot control my mood as easily as it once did.
MAY RAIN
Drops are falling…distinct…large…drips. The water beads up on the waterproof deck boards and on the leaves of spring plants. Everything alive is stretching outwards with green energy, sucking up rain, indulging in sunlight on the rare days that shine.
The Oregon rainforest has re-awakened. Ferns are unfurling under the front window; berry vines are inching tendrils along the fence. “Grow bigger,” is the whispered message to the vegetable world. “Add more leaves, more fruit, more roots.” On the rare days of warm sun, I sit on the deck and drink in the hotness on my bare skin, energy low, thirsty for more, but content. I am, I realize in a warm, bright moment, no longer dead. I have germinated like a randomly tossed bean seed, untended, but nurtured to life by falling rain.
Vikki Stea
Vikki Stea has written travel related articles for magazines and newspapers. Her long residence in the land of rain and soggy clouds led to her move to Arizona where she currently lives.