More About the Weather

I'm not going to deny that I'm a little tired of this weather. Apparently Friday and most of Saturday were beautiful this past weekend, but I just happened to fly out to Chicago that weekend, just in time for their beautiful spring weather to morph into winter snow, and by the time my plane arrived in Utah it was cold and rainy again. And it's supposed to stay rainy, if not quite as cold, for at least the duration of the Yahoo! 10-day forecast. Really, I just want to be able to don short sleeves for my 6 a.m. run and leave my jacket at home when I go to campus, and where flip-flops, and get a little sun on my arms. I know 50 degrees isn't that cold, but once we hit 70 once I can no longer be satisfied with less.

Still, I can handle the cooler weather pretty well right now because of the rain. Even though I am longing for the sun, and even though in the last several years I have become very much a warm weather person (85 degrees is about ideal, and I can easily handle 95 with no complaint), I still love the rain. I always have. I heard thunder just a moment ago and felt the same little thrill that I always feel in the thunder, and I'm hoping (hoping, hoping) that the rain will last until I leave my office to walk home in an hour or so.

When I was younger I used to think I ought to live in Oregon or Washington when I grew up because I loved the rain so much, even though I had never actually been there. I have since visited Oregon - three times, actually, and I absolutely loved it there, although because all three visits have been in August I have yet to see a cloud in the Oregon sky. And I'm no longer so sure that I could handle the rain for months (and months) because my senior year of high school we had a particularly wet winter (meaning rainy - it doesn't snow where I come from) and by the end of it I was absolutely sick of the clouds and the rivers of water gushing through the gutters and the mildewy smell of the family minivan that I drove (the privelege of being the oldest license-holding child in the family) which had carried a few too many dripping umbrellas and soaked teenagers, and even our wet German shepherd Babe. That year was the first time in my life that I was thrilled rather than disappointed to see the sun poke through the heavy rainclouds. Looking back, I think that was about when I began to discover just how much I love the summer...