Tags
Benidoleig, moods, neighbours, rain, spring, Warnings, weather
It has been raining steadily for two whole days and I am not depressed, down-in-the-dumps, or sad. What is happening here? Normally, if anything is normal these days, I would be sitting in front of my Feel-Better lamp hoping that at some point all of this grey-wet would end and the sun would come back to rescue me. But not today — in fact, I am almost happy. That is very weird to me, anyway. Maybe it’s because it’s really “raining” and not just threatening or hanging about in that grey sky not doing a damn thing. And, it happened, just like they predicted, which, in itself, is a phenomenon not often repeated in the weather world. For two days, there have been dire warning about the epic amounts of water that were going to be falling from the sky yesterday and today. Sandbags were delivered to waterfront properties; there was a run on sump pumps at hardware stores; there were dire warnings about low lying areas and to stay away from all the rivers and streams. This rain was an event — not just an annoyance.
Of course, here in my second floor apartment, I do not have to worry about a flooding basement unlike my friend, Leslie, up the street. She was planning on hourly visits to her basement last night to vacuum up the water creeping up from the foundation. That brought back memories of that last spring that I spent in Benidoleig. For 16 days and 16 nights, very biblically, we had hard, river-making rains. Everything and everyone in and out of houses in the village were damp or soaked. Since my old house was built on top of the mountain with no foundation but the dirt under the floor, water gurgled up and formed little lakes in all the low lying areas. For days, I had to keep mopping and mopping so that the whole floor didn’t decide to sail off into another room. Even the river in the middle of the campo that had been bone-dry all the ten years I had lived there, filled to the brim. It was a sight not to be missed. Folks slushed through the rain just to look at it and shake their heads and begin to form the stories they would tell about The Spring the River Filled Up. Now that was, indeed, epic, albeit a little too long and too damp for my liking.
But this rain is supposed to end tomorrow and the sandbags and sump pumps will be stored away again. I don’t think anyone — even the folks who are unhappy with their wet feet and leaking roofs — would deny just how beautiful this rain has made this spring. Delicious shades of green we won’t see once the heat arrives are everywhere. And sprinkled in among the greens are bright red and yellow and purple tulips who got to hang around a little longer because of the coolness. I hope we get to enjoy all of that beauty for a little while longer — but, please, let it be in the sun.
Annie's Odyssey 