Rain, an inventory

Everyone told me, when I moved here, that Seattle people don't carry umbrellas. This is true, and after three years I understand why. An umbrella assumes the rain is coming from above. Here it comes from every direction at once, including, on bad days, up.

The news says this has been the wettest winter Seattle has ever recorded, October through April, and I believe it. I've walked through most of it, because walking is how I get anywhere that isn't work. Somewhere around February I started keeping an inventory.

There's the rain that isn't falling. It hangs in the air at the top of the hill, and you walk into it like a curtain, and twenty minutes later your coat is heavy and you can't remember getting wet.

There's the rain that comes sideways off the Sound in the afternoon, small and hard, like someone throwing rice at you from a moving car.

There's the March rain that comes down in fat, slow drops, as if it has somewhere better to be and is only here as a favor.

There's the rain that stops the moment you get indoors and starts again the moment you leave. I don't think this is a real weather pattern. I think it's personal.

And there's the rain on the bus. I take the bus across the lake to the studio every weekday, over the floating bridge, and in the mornings the windows fog so thoroughly that the whole of Lake Washington becomes a gray rumor. Someone always wipes a porthole with their sleeve. Through it you get a piece of water the color of a nickel, and a gull standing on the railing facing into the wind, looking put out. I've come to love that ride. It's the one part of the day when nobody can ask me anything.

About one day in eight there's no rain at all, and the mountain comes out, and everybody in the city looks up at the same time like a congregation.

Duluth rain is different. It comes off the lake too, but it brings the cold with it, and it doesn't hang around being atmospheric: it falls, hard, and then it turns into something else. When I was small, a wet night meant fog, and fog meant the horn on the lift bridge going every time a boat came in under it, and the boat answering with its own. My father could tell you which boat it was by its horn. I could tell you it was time for bed.

I don't miss it, exactly. But I notice I've started counting.

What's the weather where you are, and what do you call it that nobody else would?