Rain

Rain

It’s raining gently. The hard storm hasn’t started yet but I can sense it coming: everything outside Sharon’s window is gray. The sky, the rain, the streets, even the houses and cars are drained of color. It’s a perfect afternoon for my wife to nap as she recovers from her latest surgery – she gets exhausted from the effort of propelling herself in her wheelchair and in this weather, she can sleep soundly for hours.

The rainy season started a week or two ago. Before then it was cold – very cold. San Jose is famous for warm, dry weather, but we have a winter, of sorts. Autumn days are relatively warm – forties and fifties – but starting late in November we freeze over almost every night, so that each morning when I go outside to get the newspaper the entire neighborhood is frosted over with a delicious, sugar cane white, Krispy Kreme Glaze. I love those bright, chilly, confectionary mornings; they give me the perfect opportunity to think, “Screw Dr. Atkins” before I eat breakfast.

But now it is raining, and the Northern California rainy season can seem eternal. A few drab, sunless days of greasy gray skies, then a day or a month of alternating drizzle and damp, drizzle and damp. It rarely rains very hard, although for years I’ve heard the weather reporters talk about “wild downpours”, “monstrous storms”, and even “squalls that flooded the entire Bay Area”. Regardless of hyperbolic reporters, in our little valley we rarely have a serious storm. The rain simply drips down, like grandpa just before his prostate surgery.

As a child, I loved the rain. I enjoyed the soothing rainsounds that came from roofs and drain spouts and windows, but I secretly loved the rare winter days when I was alone in the house and could sit by the living room window during a rainstorm, or when, during the summer, I could sprawl on the front porch swing and watch a storm. I’d sit motionlessly and watch the rain beat against soggy houses and ancient pavement, as if the bay to the north and the ocean to the south had somehow joined forces and were trying to hammer the slender peninsula on which we lived back under water.

I could sit like that for hours, watching our quiet street. I’d see unhappy cats sheltering themselves under parked cars, timid automobiles hesitantly traveling along the dark uneven road, and an occasional desperate neighbor dashing between house and car, all acting as if water – never more than a few hundred yards away from any point on our peninsula - had suddenly become the enemy. I’d slowly become a part of the rainstorm, breathing damp sea-fragrant air, and reveling as a delicious chill slowly covered my body. I especially loved intense summer storms when the wind would blow light sprays of cool sweet mist onto my face and the hard rain would race to the ground and then splash high from the street, until a thick foam of water flowed in every direction, and ultimately to the sea.

Somewhere, I learned that what my friends and I called ‘sewers’ were really storm drains that led to the bay, completing the cycle of water. Rain fell from the skies, onto the roofs, down to the ground, through the storm drains, into the bay, and then flew up again in leaping waves that the winds would whip high into the sky so that fresh rain could fall onto the peninsula again. Understanding that cycle, understanding in my gut that water moves from one part of the world to another in a meaningful pattern, was a watershed event. It helped me to understand that life works in cycles, as it should. As it must, for better or worse.

My wife is going through a particularly difficult cycle in her life. It has lasted for several years and we do not know when it will end. Surgery, recovery, decline. Surgery, recovery, decline. Her problems are not life threatening but they are crippling. She has spent most of the last three years in a wheelchair and will never walk properly – the bones in her feet have deteriorated due to a rare medical condition. Her biggest problem, long term, may not be walking; it may be adjusting to the unfair restraints life has put on her. However, we have a strong marriage, two sons and a daughter-in-law with whom we are very close, a grandson, extended family – Sharon has much in her life from which to draw strength.

I write this because Sharon (and I) are luckier than the woman in the next bed. She lost a 33-year old son in Iraq last year, she just had surgery on a badly broken leg, and she is dieing of cancer. Her daughter-in-law lives in another state; there are no children, no other family. Her life will end shattered, with no resolution.

Yesterday she told me that as a child she loved the warm spring rains. She and her sister and their dog would run into their yard and dance until they were completely soaked, then howl with laughter as their mother dried them off. Yesterday was a long time ago.

In her tiny closet, on the breast of the blouse she wore to the hospital, is an American flag pin. She still wears it but says she feels betrayed and deserted by her country. She gazes out the window and cries gray tears. I hold her hand as we chat but she has trouble following my voice. It is drowned by the sound of the approaching storm.