The Rain In July

Doug posts: "I got up this morning to discover that it had rained during the night. Real rain, not just an exaggerated fog. I’m not sure I remember it ever raining in July in the Bay Area, so this is something pretty special. Nice for my garden too, and the cats had gotten really dusty so this has cleaned them right up."

Au contraire, mon ami. If you had the weather engraved into your soul such as only an unhappy woman stuck in the boonies will have, forever after, you'd know it always rains once in July. I kid Doug, he works here, taking care of such house and grounds as there are. We both live in Berkeley ... but the country town of which I write isn't far away, maybe sixty miles ...

In time, however, and in the lumpy bag of space that time drags along behind, rough edges becoming smooth, harsh lines gently blurring ...Oh, dear, we are slipping into novel time ... where it is long ago but not so very far away after all ...

(from The Last Time Anyone Was Happy)

By July, the buildings and roofs and fields and even hearts and hopes had so thoroughly shrunken and dried in the heat— as if we were all some ghostly extension of the prune industry, only it was the sun and the air which dried us, daily, at high temperature, never mind that it felt as hot as the prune driers when they ran—that any thought of rain, the soaking, flooding winter rainstorms, the river cresting at 41 feet, had long since been driven from the feeble collective unconscious of Venada.

Until the July thunderstorm. There always was one, and it always came as a surprise, people saying We don't have thunderstorms! which we mostly did not, and It doesn't rain in summer, which it always did, at least once. And there was so much work, in those days, to farm life, to summer. Keeping prune orchards watered and your workers from disappearing after their first paycheck. Dragging out rusty prune harvest equipment with the prayer that it last another year.

In town, the businesses around the plaza were quiet, which made Mama's tour the more delightful,when their ceilings began to leak. And leak they would. The Bank of America building with its columns in front, its certain undeniable grandeur, set out as homely a collection of buckets and pans as anyone, the redwood planking of their high, vaulted ceiling especially prone to shrinkage in the heat. Plink, plonk. She watched for a while in fascination. We had to make a thorough tour of the plaza, that her inspection might be complete. Not that I blame her. Attractions, then, were simpler, both more enjoyable and hellishly sparse. Boredom so integral to country life that people made no bones about the least excitement. I know Mama's pleasure in these things reached, touched levels that may no longer exist, in the modern heart.

Mama knew we were good for at minimum one colossal thunderstorm per summer; her deepest pleasure came in watching the spectacle from the safety of her high old bed, where I would climb up beside her—after having unplugged, as per ordered, every cord from every socket, house and barn, her excuse for sending a child nothing more than that handy enfeeblement that appeared on demand and was otherwise forgot.

The Electric—her name for the beast that lived within our walls, I had brought home a chart in third grade that explained it, which she admired, tacked up and ignored—taken care of, we settled in the darkness, surveying from our perch if not the entire universe, then certainly all relevant parts. I hardly knew what fear was, in those days; it disappeared in the company of that old woman. Who not old, to me, not at all. Had no age. For all I knew, that's what a mother was, and so it is that I remain linked to Mama's reactions and Mama's beliefs. Her amusement when everyone else forgot: it always rains once, in summer.