Allegorical sun and rain

Green Lake Park today
(before the storm)

Rainiest winter in Seattle since 1895 (when someone first started keeping records).  It was a cold, wet fall.  A cold, wet winter.  And it's been a cold, wet spring. 

Not Arctic cold.  Not a Minnesota winter.  Just cold.  And wet.

And then yesterday, the air miraculously warmed to near-70.  Thoughts of spring hiking danced in my head.  I woke, half-planning to do my annual climb of Mount Si -- my traditional warm-up for the hiking season.  I had breakfast, and studied carefully the weather app on my phone.  Temperatures in the low to mid 70s, it said.  But rain beginning in mid-afternoon, and rain tomorrow.

I could do it.  I could get an early start, drive to North Bend (above which Mt. Si towers), and be up the trail and down again before the rain arrived.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  I hesitated.  I hesitated too long. 

Maybe next week, I told myself. 

As penance for my laziness, I determined to do at least a long walk.  Longer than my daily four-mile loop around the University campus.  I donned shorts (first time this season!), and a t-shirt (ditto!) and walked out the door.

I reached the campus, continued north through Frat Row to Ravenna, and headed west to Green Lake.  By the time I reached Green Lake, I was feeling great.  After a quick latte (hey, I never claimed to be Daniel Boone!), I wandered through a neighborhood north of the lake, looking for a house that I almost once bought.  (I think I found it.)  Then, back to the lake.

When Seattle wants to be beautiful -- when it fully embraces Springtime -- when the sun is shining and the flowers are blooming and the leaves are nearly all out -- when all goes well, you wonder why you ever bother traveling anywhere else.  And so it was today.

I began circling Green Lake at about 2 p.m. -- wondering, as I always do, why all these young people were out and able to disport themselves with such obvious pleasure during normal working hours.  This was a question that used to worry me considerably while I was part of the working force.  Now?  Meh.  I just accept it as a given, part of the background scenery -- no more to be questioned than to ask why ducks paddle so aimlessly around the lake.

The walk around the lake -- roughly three miles -- couldn't have been more beautiful, or the temperature and zephyr-like breezes more beguiling.  (Or my writing more cliché-ridden.)  The sun was warm, the air was comfortable, the human wildlife was, as always, varied and astounding.  I finished my loop, and noted that -- for once -- my phone's weather app probably was correct.  It was clouding up. 

By the time I made it back to the University District (after ten miles of hoofing it), the first drops were falling.  By the time a bus reached the nearest bus stop, the rain was falling in torrents.  The weather gods held off briefly to allow me to reach my house relatively drily from my bus stop, and then -- Donder und Blitzen!  The rain fell, the thunder roared, the cats cowered, the electric lights flickered, all pretense of the Birth of Springtime was cast aside.

And then it dawned on me.  Someone or something was angry.  Angry on behalf of millions of Americans whose health care Congressmen had blithely ignored today -- Congressmen less interested in the hardships of their constituents than in dotting the i's and crossing the t's of their nineteenth century ideologies, or in simply complying with the angry desires of their Accidental President.

Springtime is over in America, the weather gods hinted.  We gave you a taste of it, but storm clouds and angry deities lie ahead. 

Well, that's how it felt in the Northwest Corner, at least.  Where you live, the weather today may have been perfectly calm.