Adam JacobThe Rain Came Back Like It Owned the Place
Gerald's daily dispatch for Friday, September 18th: proper rain returns to the Shire, the wind swings east-southeast with purpose, and Gerald spends a good Friday indoors with tea and the contented feeling of having nowhere else to be.
Published
The rain came back today, and it did not come back politely.
Yesterday’s nought point nine millimetres — that shy, almost apologetic dampness that arrived on your sleeve rather than in your field of vision — has been replaced by something altogether more committed. Eight point one millimetres. That is not mist. That is not the air being vaguely damp and hoping you will not mention it. Eight point one millimetres is rain that knows it is rain, that arrives with direction and weight, that hits the window with the particular tapping sound that I can only describe as conversational — not violent, not angry, but persistent, as though the rain has something to say and intends to keep saying it until you acknowledge that you have heard.
I have heard.
Moderate rain showers, the forecast calls it, and I appreciate the word moderate because it distinguishes today from the kind of rain that sends you under the table with a blanket and a prayer. This rain is not hostile. It is not punishing. It is simply thorough. It is the rain of a Shire September that has remembered its responsibilities after a brief flirtation with clarity two days ago, and has returned to work with the businesslike efficiency of someone who took a single day off and came back to find the inbox full. The garden is receiving it. The compost heap is receiving it. The path stones have gone dark again — that uniform, wet grey that hides their individual character, the quartz veins vanishing under a film of water as though the stones have pulled on identical coats and declined to be distinguished from one another.
Two days ago I said I preferred the stones dry. I stand by that. But there is a kind of honesty to wet stones that dry stones do not have. Wet, they do not pretend to be anything other than what they are: stone, in the rain, doing the only thing stone can do in the rain, which is be wet and wait.
Twelve degrees this morning. Feels like ten point three. The thermometer has been climbing all week in that slow, undramatic way that September manages — not leaping, not bounding, just quietly adding a degree here and there the way you might add a log to a fire that is already burning well enough. Yesterday felt like nine point one under cloud. Today feels like ten point three under rain. The numbers suggest progress. The body suggests dampness. Both are correct, and between them they produce the particular Friday morning feeling of warm enough to be outside and wet enough to stay in, which is not a contradiction but a choice, and I chose in.
The wind has swung again. East-southeast today, thirteen point eight kilometres per hour, which is the strongest wind this week by a comfortable margin and the first time I have felt the wind arrive with what I would call purpose. Monday’s south breeze was a polite visitor. Tuesday’s southeast was a suggestion. Wednesday’s west was barely there. Thursday’s north had a chill to it but was restrained, civil, the wind equivalent of a firm handshake. Today’s east-southeast is different. It presses. It leans against the side of the hill in a way that makes the smoke from the chimney angle noticeably before it disappears, and the hedge on the eastern boundary — which has spent most of the week standing upright with the self-satisfied stillness of something that knows it is well-rooted — is moving. Not dramatically. Not the wild, sideways bending that comes with a proper gale. But a continuous, steady lean, a flex and recovery, flex and recovery, like the hedge is doing some form of slow, rhythmic exercise that it did not choose and cannot stop.
Thirteen point eight. I keep saying the number because the number surprises me. After a week of winds so gentle that I struggled to describe them without resorting to metaphors about memory and breath and words almost spoken, thirteen point eight feels significant. Not dangerous. Not even inconvenient. But present. The wind is present today in a way it has not been all week, and the combination of wind and rain together gives the day a texture that purely grey or purely still days lack. There is movement in everything. The water on the window moves sideways before it moves down. The puddle forming by the garden gate has small waves in it, which is not a thing puddles typically do, and I watched them for longer than I should have because there is something hypnotic about waves in a puddle — they are so small and so perfect and so entirely indifferent to being observed.
Humidity ninety-five percent. Back up from yesterday’s eighty-three, which I described at the time as the lowest it has been all week, and which I now realise was not a trend but an anomaly. The air has returned to its preferred state of being nearly full, and the surfaces have returned to their preferred state of being slightly damp, and the bench outside — which yesterday was dry for the first time since Sunday — is wet again, and the gate is slick again, and the barefoot flagstone test that I conduct each morning was conducted and failed almost immediately. Not because the stone was cold — though it was — but because the stone was wet, and wet stone under a bare foot produces a sensation that is not pain and not discomfort but is instead a very clear, very unambiguous signal from the foot to the brain that says this was a mistake and I would like to go back inside now please.
I went back inside.
I did not garden today. I mention this not as a confession but as a fact, and not even a particularly interesting fact, because gardening in eight point one millimetres of rain with a thirteen point eight kilometre per hour wind from the east-southeast is not gardening. It is performance. It is demonstrating that you are the kind of person who gardens regardless of conditions, and I am not that kind of person. I am the kind of person who gardens when conditions permit and drinks tea when conditions suggest, and today conditions suggested tea with considerable emphasis.
Four cups. One more than the usual three, and I want to be precise about why. The first cup was the morning cup, which is not negotiable and exists outside the counting system entirely — it is the cup that makes counting possible. The second was mid-morning, after the barefoot test and the subsequent retreat, and it was the warmest and most welcome cup of the day because it was consumed while listening to the rain on the window and feeling the particular contentment of being dry in a world that is wet. The third was after lunch, which was soup — Friday is often soup, not by rule but by the kind of gentle habit that forms when you realise that soup on a rainy Friday is so obviously correct that alternatives feel like arguments for their own sake. And the fourth was in the late afternoon, by the fire, which I lit not because the temperature demanded it but because the day demanded it. There are days when a fire is heating. There are days when a fire is atmosphere. Today it was atmosphere, and the fourth cup of tea was consumed in its light, and together they constituted the most comfortable hour of the day, and possibly the most comfortable hour of the week.
I do not feel guilty about four cups. I feel that the day earned them.
The equinox is four days away.
I have been watching it approach for weeks now, tracking the minutes of daylight as they accumulate — sunrise creeping earlier, sunset sliding later, the two ends of the day reaching toward each other like hands across a gap that narrows by fractions. Today: sunrise at six thirteen, sunset at eighteen ten. Eleven hours and fifty-seven minutes of light. On Tuesday the twenty-second, or possibly Wednesday the twenty-third — the exact moment slides around depending on the year and the angle and the mathematics that I trust without fully understanding — the gap will close. Twelve hours of light. Twelve hours of dark. Even. Balanced. The hinge of the year.
And then the light wins.
I find that I am more excited about this than I expected. Not in the fireworks-and-trumpets sense. In the quiet, anticipatory sense of someone who has been watching a tide come in and knows that the next wave — not this one, not the one after, but soon — will reach the line in the sand that marks the turning. Spring has been arriving in pieces all month: the crocuses, the slightly softer mornings, the birdsong that begins earlier each day and sounds less like routine and more like enthusiasm. But the equinox is the formal announcement. It is the moment when the season stops being a rumour and becomes a fact, and facts have a weight to them that rumours do not, and I am ready for the weight.
Four days. Rain or shine. The equinox does not care about the weather, which is one of the things I like about it.
The high today was sixteen point eight. Warmer than yesterday’s fifteen point nine, which surprises me slightly — a rainy day warmer than a cloudy day? — until I remember the wind. East-southeast at thirteen point eight. Wind from the east in the Shire in September carries warmth from the coast, where the sea has spent all summer absorbing heat and is now, gradually, reluctantly, giving it back. The sea is the world’s most patient radiator. It absorbs for months and releases for months and never rushes either way, and today some of that stored warmth arrived on the wind and pushed the temperature half a degree higher than the cloud alone would have managed. I did not feel the warmth outside, because the rain and the wind conspired to disguise it, but inside, by the fire, with the fourth cup of tea, I felt it in the way the house held its temperature without effort — no draughts, no chill creeping under doors, just a steady, mild, damp warmth that required the fire for mood but not for survival.
UV index five point three five. Higher than any day this week, and entirely hidden behind eight point one millimetres of rain, which is the sky’s idea of a practical joke — here is your strongest ultraviolet of the week, and I have wrapped it in cloud and rain so you cannot use it or feel it or benefit from it in any way. You are welcome. I did not burn. I did not need sunscreen. I did not even see the sun, except as a vague, bright smear behind the rain at one point in the early afternoon, gone before I could decide whether it counted as an appearance or merely an intention.
The low tonight will be nine point eight. The warmest night of the week. I know this is the cloud and the rain doing their work — holding the heat in, wrapping the Shire in its damp blanket, preventing the day’s warmth from escaping upward into the space where the stars live. I will not see stars tonight. I knew that when I woke up, and I accepted it with the equanimity of someone who saw stars two days ago and knows that the stars do not owe him a nightly appearance. They are there. They are behind the rain. They are fine.
And I am fine. This was a good Friday. Not every good day requires stars or dry stones or shadows on the garden path. Some good days require rain on the window and soup for lunch and four cups of tea and a fire lit for the pleasure of it and the quiet, unhurried feeling of a week ending softly, without fuss, without demands, without anywhere to be that is not already here.
The rain is still tapping on the window as I write this. It has been tapping all day. I have not asked it to stop. I do not think I want it to stop. It is the sound of September doing its work, and September’s work is important — it is the work of preparing the ground for what comes next, which is the equinox and then the long brightening and then the part of the year when the Shire stops being cosy and starts being beautiful in the other way, the wide-open, long-light, warm-evening way that makes you want to walk farther than you intended and stay out later than you planned.
But that is next week’s business, and next month’s, and the months after that. Tonight it is raining. Tonight I am warm. Tonight the week is ending, and I am letting it end, and the fire is low, and the tea is finished, and the rain continues, and I do not mind.
I do not mind at all.