Written Yesterday

[pecunium]

It's raining, late May and it's raining, not the minor rain we sometimes get in late May, or early June, but rather a steady, semi-heavy rain. Happily it's not the typical rain of Calif., cold and windy. This is rather a "million dollar rain," mid-sized drops and falling soft and straight.

Sadly it's going to be costing people money rather than making it. Webb, the guy who owns the place Maia's boarding the horses cut his hay last week. All of it is dryig in the field, still too wet to bale, now it will mildew. This is the second bad hay year for him. Last year the rain lasted so long the has was practialy straw at mowing.

Right now Maia is as Meeting, and I'm writing on a legal pad at Uptown Espresso. I walked the 1/3rd of a mile in the rain. I'd rather have my cloak (a huge pile of wool, some eight lbs. dry, it's had several adventures, but for most of 20 years it's kept the wind and weather off of me), but it's packed away in a cedar chest in L.A., who knew I'd be looking for protection from the rain. Ah, the joys of moving.

Walking in the rain is a treat. It might be less so if I didn't have a hat, but I do, a stetson-styled fedora. It's like having my own roof. I can hear the patter of the rain and sense the tempo. The rate at which it beads and falls in front of my eye tells me how heavily it's falling.

Spring rain is the best. Rosemary and wisteria, jasmine and grass and all the other scents of the season are lifted, mingled and constrained. On a sunny day the odors are hard to track, each of them drifts and the threads are hard to track. On a rainy day they don't travel so much, I could walk blindfolded and map the garden of the city streets.

The coffee shop is cosy. Usually there is lots of personal space andpeople go outside rather than impinge. Today the chairs are full and one must urn sidewise to pass to an empty one. Newspaper rustles, the girl doing her biology homework (something about Fe regulation in the blood, with little diagrams of kidneys), a conversation about movies (a Hollywood coversation, by people who know movies and The Industry. The sort of thing I would overhear when I was a studio projectionist at Raleigh), the woman doing some sort of work on her laptop, all of them sitting together in the warm of the coffee flavored air, club members in for a warm-up. No one is walking by. It's a small piece of autumn, or even deepest winter people getting out of the weather.

Me, I'm going to walk back to the meetig house.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

And early on Monday that rain reached here -- the Los Angeles area. Not as heavy, but still the soft, slow, unspectacular, persistent kind the Navajo call "Female Rain".... the kind that actually does much good. As you say, it's the warm summerish rain (so rare in California) that brings odors together and so clearly to our senses. I was thinking about that while reading your recent post mentioning rain in Tennessee -- summer rains in the midwest smell so different from those in most of California -- probably largely because of the differences in soil microflora between frequent-rain and dry-for-months areas.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kyl3_/]

I came here on a recommendation from Desiree delicata77, and I quite enjoyed myself with this entry.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The weight of it varied. I think we got an inch, parts of the county about half that. Cambria about 2 1/4.

The varieties of rain never cease to amaze me. The sodden downbursts of the midwest, the vague comfort of virgin rain, with it's brief cooling and teasing smell of water, the muggy lack of relief in the Northeast, where the
humidity barely drops when the rain falls, and pops right back when it stops.

The smell of wet desert when the rain does hit the ground, and the intensity of the effect. Or the hot, dry in the nose smell of dusty asphalt being wetted.

Seattle's almost scentless rain, so soft and small is it.

Or the just plain wet smell of a four day storm in L.A..

TK