Blame It on the Rain

It has been raining here the last few days. My attitude toward rain has changed over the years. It rarely rained when I was a kid growing up in southern California. When it did, it was exciting because it was something different and it meant we got to eat lunch inside at school and play heads up 7-up. The rain would be the top story on the evening news. It seemed normal at the time, but you would think a news station that covers Los Angeles and most of southern California would have something more important to report other than it is raining and people are running into each other with their cars. I had no idea that it actually rains in the summer in some places until we visited my mom’s side of the family in North Dakota and Minnesota. Not only did it rain in the summer while we were there, we experienced violent thunder storms (lighting hit a tree outside my window) and a twister. I started to like the rain less when I was in college because I did not like riding my bike in the rain to campus. Then it got worse during an El Nino year when we had torrential rain. I think it rained 12 inches in 12 hours are one point and school was even canceled. My street flooded not once, but twice and both times my car was parked on the street and was flooded as well. People at my school could make anything fun though. When my roommate and I got our cars to higher ground, some guys in a row boat picked us up and rowed us home. They even had beer in the boat so we had a drink on the way. My bad luck with floods did not end there. During another extreme weather event when I lived in the bay area, my street flooded due to the overflowing creeks and we were almost evacuated. I had a bag packed and was ready to go if the fire department came down our street. The house I lived in also had about an inch of water in it due to poor drainage in the yard. This was a very long night since my roommates and I stayed up trying to keep the water out of the house and moving things around to the drier parts of the house. This taught me to respect and somewhat fear the power of rain. I realized weather is powerful and uncontrollable. Now here I am living in Virginia where the average rainfall per year is about four times that of California. I really did not like all the rain when we first moved here, especially in the summer. The last couple of years have been quite dry which caused the grass, plants and trees to all dry out. This spring has been fairly wet and everything is green and growing, which has made me learn to appreciate the rain. This area is very green with lots of trees, which I like, but it takes quite a bit of rain to keep them green. Now the only things I do not like about rain are that it makes my hair big and I have to sit in traffic longer, but that is not so bad.