Michigan vs. Oregon Rain

It’s raining today for the fifth day in a row. It’s an Oregon rain. Non-stop. No sunrise. No sunset. The sky will lighten to show it is day, but otherwise remains an evenly spread wet concrete grey. No heavily saturated clouds powering down on us, threatening, then jostling into their positions to rain. Pouring dumping buckets of basement flooding rain. That’s what we’re used to in Michigan. Not this. Not this static, every-waking-moment-with-no-break-in-the-sky-for-the-sun-to-beam-through-momentarily-giving-us-hope-and-a-sense-of-humanity-again rain.

Michigan people walk with umbrellas to shield themselves from this, if they go out to walk at all. In Oregon, umbrellas were rare. Rain was just a part of daily life for six months. People adapted. Why give up your left or right hand, or both on a windy day, for six months every time you step outside? But in Michigan, we haven’t adapted to that yet. We still give up a hand to our umbrellas, to walk beneath our own roofing with no gutter system, which would only clog with leaf debris and fail anyway. More than this, we have not yet learned to commune with the rain in the same way as Oregonians who live in the damp sweatshirts and jeans and call it cozy all the same.

No, in Michigan we still try to separate ourselves from the rain at every opportunity, the umbrella our remaining stronghold. Keep it off of me. It’s not enough to wear a rain coat, but keep it at least twelve inches away from touching me. And we like this view from inside our umbrella space. Perhaps it has something more to do with our living where it snows for as many months as it rains in Oregon. We sit inside our cozy warm homes and look out onto the snow. We do not commune with it. We shovel it, plow it, salt and sand it, pack and shape it for entertainment, and some of us wear devices and fuel up motorized technology that allows us to control it, to command it as we ride over it (and sometimes snow refuses to be commanded, as my first high school sweetheart must have realized at a final moment when he was buried and died in an avalanche while skiing in Utah).

Rain is only unfrozen snow, yet we cannot figure out how to command and control it (note earlier comments on failing gutters and wet basement), so we remain separated from it. We refuse to commune with it, and instead stay indoors, or when we go out, refuse to embrace it by filling our hands with umbrellas.

There is a lull in the water slapping against the windows. A break in the waterfall that formed at the place where the gutter is clogged. I hear birds chirping, singing their instinctive morning calls as they no doubt flutter and shake the moisture from their feathers and attempt to fluff themselves dry in the 100% humidity. A lull where, though drops do not fall from the sky, they continue to drip from roofs and eaves and leaves on trees. Where puddles driven through splash onto sidewalks. And the air can do nothing but hang thick with moisture. No rain from the sky, but to walk in it now feels like swimming, and where my hair sucks in the damp and tightens into ringlets at my neck, I feel I should grow gills. Soon, if this rain will not cease. Soon, if the sun should not shine. Soon, if it wasn’t for Oregon where the people have no gills.