Rain

Yeah, well, so we hardly had any summer this past summer. Oh, we had a warm day here and there, sometimes even a few warm days in a row, but what we mostly had was not summer. What we mostly had was clouds and un-summery cold temperatures.

So, sure, it does seem unfair to suddenly discover that summer is over, even Indian summer, and to realize that there'll be no going outside again without a jacket for at least another six months. Even though the "summer" that is over this year was a mythical construct, a merely formal place on the calendar, not anything that non-Northwesterners -- those real kinds of people we used to read about in our Dick and Jane books -- happy families with glowing cheeks who visited farms with bright red barns and silos and celebrated hot, non-rainy Fourth of July's and shouted with joy on snowy sleigh rides to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving -- those kinds of folks -- would recognize as summer.

But, surprisingly, this post isn't a lament for our summer that never was. Au contraire, as the French would say, when not out on strike.

I walked through my neighborhood today, onto and around the University campus, down into U Village (an unenclosed shopping center so upscale that there's nothing there that you really need to buy -- but where you feel better about life for just having walked through it), and then back home. It was overcast. In fact, the "cast" wasn't "over" us at all; we were right in the middle of it. We were sort of "intracast," I guess. Which is to say that it was cloudy, and that at times I was walking through bits of the clouds as they touched down to earth. It was drizzling, which is something it does a lot of here in the Northwest Corner. It was drizzling, then it was lightly raining, then drizzling again -- and then sometimes just foggy, foggy at that point where you know it really wants to and intends to start drizzling all over again but hasn't yet quite summoned up the gumption to begin.

The trees -- and my neighborhood and the campus and all the surrounding area are forests of trees --were at the stage where most were still green, but where many species were turning to yellow, or had already turned yellow; and where a few of the more surprising species had avoided yellow altogether and were a mass of flaming scarlet. But the greens and the yellows and the almost yellows and the scarlets were all muted by the overcast and the fog -- their colors still eye-catching, but toned down, as though the painter had stirred a little black into their pigments.

And it was quiet, hushed, even in the middle of campus, with that muffled quiet that comes along with the overcast's dipping down and dripping down and becoming fog. Fallen leaves were soggy underfoot, and the air smelled of fog and fir and drizzle and rotting leaves. It all brought back happy, secure memories of walking to school through similar leaves and wetness and dripping trees when I was a kid.

So I walked, feeling sad and nostalgic and subdued, as well as damp, but experiencing all these feelings in a strangely contented and satisfying way. I was quietly at one with my surroundings, feeling happiness of a sort that Dick and Jane -- living in their Manichean world of sharply differentiated seasons, a world where it's pretty much either hot and dry, or cold and snowy, depending on the time of year, a world so much in contrast to my cool, drizzly world, my soggy world of ambiguities, my woodsy world where rotting dead plants give life to wondrous mushrooms and toadstools and other fungal forest growths, some beautiful and some grotesque, some delicious and some deadly, and some all of the above -- probably never experienced.

Don't get me wrong. I can get mighty sick of rain -- even soft drizzle along multi-hued forest paths -- after I slog through it nonstop for months on end. But today, the rains were just beginning. I was still at the stage when the drizzle takes me back to childhood, when every season, when life itself, was fresh and ever interesting and new. The season's rains had just begun, and I was feeling that I was living in the best of all worlds.

And I suspect I really do.