Gotta love the rain
To be in California for five straight years in a drought without a single drop of rain is to know what it means to miss New Orleans. When the rain started it would be a drizzle that would cause everyone to rejoice. This is rain?
When I came to housesit in 2004 in New Orleans at my friend’s already dark cozy nest of a house, I would lounge in their bed, reading to a low lamp, and listening to the thunder rock the walls of the house. Pouring, torrential rains coming to wash us away. My then husband would call me from Marin County, sitting on our back deck in the splendor of the rolling Marin Hills that can only be compared to Tuscany or some other beautiful Mediterranean locale. He would say, “Don’t you miss it here?”
And me in my cozy dark nest of a cocoon, would think of Marin with the same abject fear as the elderly have of words like retirement community and nursing home, and would answer him with a resounding no.
I wanted to the drama of a torrential downpour, I wanted to feel like here in this world a house was a shelter, I wanted a slower pace to calm my racing mind, I wanted roots as thick and deep as a live oak, I wanted to get old and watch moss hang from my hair and I wanted to warm my bones against the chill of a foggy night in San Francisco.
I love the rain and only in New Orleans can you get rain like this – like today – this darkened sky, this crack then rolling din of thunder, the flash of lightning in the grey distance. There is no place like home.