To the rain
It’s been raining incessantly in Taipei. Even for a climate with high humidity, a fall typhoon season, and a plum rain season in the late spring, the relentless rain this week has been remarkable. There is never a reprieve – we go to sleep with the rain drumming on our roof, and wake to it gushing out of drain pipes. All week, we watch the rain make diagonal razor slices across our classroom windows; on our walk home, we wrestle with inside-out umbrellas while the rain blows horizontally, rendering the attempt to keep dry pitiful and futile. Inside our house – an old construction up in the hills where the humidity is even higher than it is in the flatlands – ants are taking cover and our walls have become soft and soggy, in some places, the paint is beginning to bubble. Everyone is glum and impatient for the rain to go away.
I recall the times when I’ve been caught in the rain. Three memories come to mind immediately. The first is when I’m nine and my childhood best friend and I are at the school fall fair and without warning, the skies slide open and typhoon rain starts pouring down. We run and squeal and huddle together and the rain has transported us back to being five-year-olds, when splashing in muddy puddles is the pinnacle of being.
The second memory of being caught in the rain is when my husband and I are still early in our dating life. He’s just finished a semester studying abroad in Spain and is meeting me in New York City. I’ve come down from my college in the Hudson River Valley. He’s been traveling for six months and only has a few more dollars left in his bank account. I take him to an Italian restaurant near Times Square and after dinner, we are walking in the kaleidoscopic neon lights when it begins to rain and all the colored lights glisten in the wet. Out of nowhere, men holding bunches of fold-up umbrellas in their hands, like bushels of bananas, and large umbrellas hooked along their arms, appear on every street corner. Some chant, “Barato! Barato! Barato!” while others sing, “Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella.” We purchase one and crouch together underneath and my husband pulls me in close and I remember the Taiwanese love song about sharing a small umbrella.
The third memory of being caught in the rain that comes to mind is when my mother and I are in Siena, Italy together during a tense time in our relationship. I am accompanying her on a trip with a group of her friends because my dad, who is supposed to go with her, can no longer go and I am his replacement. In Siena, my mother and I have pulled away from the tour group. We are walking quietly along the streets, meandering into little shops, without purpose or conversation. We are supposed to meet up with the rest of the group at a designated spot. It begins to rain – big, plump drops at first, one at a time, and then the rain starts to come down more quickly. We realize we have gotten ourselves a bit lost and are uncertain which way to go. Instinctively, we hook arms and cover our heads with our free hands, and we begin to run a little – my mother is still young, only in her early 60s – and we start to laugh as we wend this way and that before we miraculously make it to the place where we are meant to meet the group.
All three of these are positive memories of being in the rain - the rain seems to unlatch something. I wonder why, then, the rain makes us so glum? I come upon this poem by Ursula K. Le Guin and will save it for the next rainy day.
To the Rain
Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls in your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.