Writers Need Rain

One of my students brought an editorial from The Seattle Times dated August 25, 1990.  The author is Pat Dillon.

"It sounded like piano keys tinkling.  The Douglas firs dripped freshly, smelling like toothpaste should.  And judging from the depth of the puddles on the patio and from the darkness of the soaked garden dirt, the rain evidently started during the middle of the night.

It had turned to a heavy mist that hung around all the next morning.  Out on the Sound, where the mist hung heaviest, where you couldn't see, the foghorns blew deep-toned toasts . . ."

"'The weather's definitely turned,' my brother said, looking out the window into the mist toward the Sound.  His voice sounded somber.  But he had a relieved look.  He's a poet.  He needs the rain.

It hadn't rained on Puget Sound in nearly a month, and the tanned natives of the Pacific Northwest were getting edgy.

Rain is their blood, their life.  Rain paints their landscape.  Rain restores the character of the place just as it begins to fade, just as it gives the salmon entree to stop swimming in confused circles and return to the rivers of their birth.

The sun is fine.  Just not in great doses.  Like visiting relatives, it saps them, just as it had been sapping the marigolds and dahlias and petunias in my mother's garden and the neighbors.'

So it was good that the rain came, good for everybody, that it arrived the day my kids and I returned to California . . ."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many Puget Sound writers welcome the rain.  While I love to complain about it, I need the rain.  I need my studio window wet with drops of fall.  I need shelter to watch the rain with my two dogs and the Maine Coon cat.  I welcome the clicking of my computer keys nearly in sync with the drops on the window.  I walk the dogs to feel and smell the rain.  I return to my study and listen to it.



catherine@catherinealexander.net