Firstly, that line from “My Fair Lady” is pure utter horsehockey. Anyone who has spent any time at all on the plains knows that rain is as scarce as hens teeth, and I would wager that the plains in Spain are not much different from the plains of Colorado.
Firstly, a lot of Americans seem somewhat amazed when they find out that Denver, Colorado actually isn’t in the mountains. As you can see from the picture on our right, the mountains are far to the west of town, and much of the sprawling suburbs, in which I live, are to the south and east of town, making the mountains even further.
So, most of suburban Denver, although having nice views of the mountains, lie squarely on the relatively flat and featureless “great plains” of which we have heard so much about in American lore and song.
One feature that these featureless plains do have though is a scarcity of rain. On average, Denver gets about 15 inches of rain. Contrast that to Miami, Florida where about 58 inches fall every year, or Seattle with 38 inches. Portions of Kauai Island, Hawaii receive 460 inches of rainfall in an average year.
I grew up in South Florida, on the northern edge of the Everglades, at the southern tip of Lake Okeechobee. We got about the same amount of rain each year as Miami, and I remember as a kid, playing in mud puddles, or enjoying the warm rain, which often falls as a slow drizzle for several days at a time.
Our American songbook is full of songs that celebrate life in the rain. “Singing in the Rain”, “Fool in the Rain”, “She’s my kind of Rain”, “Have you ever seen the rain” and even “Blame it on the Rain”.
I like rain. I miss rain. When it does rain here in Colorado, I get the giggles when I see some of my co-workers gather at the windows, noses pressed tight, watching the water fall from the sky as if it were some blessed miracle. I suppose that here in Colorado, where some years as little as 7 inches of rain fall, a good hard rain is indeed a miracle.
Then there is the smell of rain. I’ve seen candles marked as being scented like rain, but they smell nothing like what I remember from my childhood.
And the sound. I recall with great fondness a visit to my great-grandmothers little house in Lulaton, Georgia, where it would rain so hard that it couldn’t drain into the sandy ground fast enough, and it was heaven to grab a book from one of her shelves, and curl up in a chair, and listen to the sound of the rain on her corrugated tin roof.
When I once suggested replacing our aging cedar shake roof with a new tin one, my partner looked at me like I had just suggested he crawl into bed with a box full of spiders. “Can you imagine the noise”, he said? My point exactly.
In two weeks we are closing a purchase of a condo in Pompano Beach, Florida. The picture on the right is the actual view from our new balcony. My partner will begin to winter there, and, if the 401K gods are good to me, in 3 or 4 years I can retire there full time.
I can’t wait to be someplace where it rains again, where you don’t have to run the furnace fan 24×7 all winter so that the whole house humidifier can get the house up to 30% humidity, or have to sleep with a desktop humidifier at the foot of the bed running full blast so you don’t wake up with a bloody nose.
I miss the rain.