I hated the rain for a long time. This is not news to my long-suffering husband (the actual amount of suffering is still open to debate), but I expect he will be happy to find out that things have changed.

I can’t now even remember when or why that antipathy began, but noise was a large part of it. Our house doesn’t have rain gutters, so there is dripping all along the roof line, including right outside the bedroom windows. Mine is open all the time, except in the bitterest cold, because we keep our door closed so cats stay out of our room (for a variety of reasons to be detailed later, perhaps) and that makes it stuffy, which makes it hard for me to get to sleep.

But I digress; let’s call that background and move on. Anyway, the sound of the water dripping both above and all around me used to irritate me to the point that I described it as “The Death of 1,000 Drops” and it did feel like torture in a way. So rain was bad even when I was safe at home, and heaven forbid I should have to venture out on the road in the rain! It is such a rare occurrence in Southern California that drivers are known to behave especially badly. Even here, where traffic really isn’t bad at all, it gets worse by a couple orders of magnitude when water starts falling from the sky.

My driving is pretty much limited to church-related activities and shopping, which is also more of a hassle in the rain. Wearing glasses doesn’t help, spots before my eyes make me crazy (ok, crazier then) and there’s more but you get the idea. Rain = bad.

But then Southern California had this little drought, now in its sixth year. And the reservoir which provides our water has been reduced to something like 32% of its capacity. And I am still thinking about having somebody come out and look at the well we happen to have in a closet, to find out if and how we might be able to use that as a supplemental water source or in an emergency (and yes, I am extremely grateful to have that option!). So being bothered by rain hasn’t been much of a problem for quite a while.

But it has been raining this year, a little bit at a time, and in this arid landscape that means that we have GREEN GRASS on the hillsides and along the roadsides. People who live in greener climates get that every year in spring, but it’s much more short-lived here, if it comes at all; last year we had almost no green at all, so I noticed and appreciated the first sprouts and the gradual change in the tint of the scenery when it appeared a couple of weeks ago.

So this year when it rains voices in my head aren’t screaming “Make it stop!” and none of the other annoyances seem nearly as important as they did before. This morning I sat out on our back porch and watched the rain, and it was good. It felt like a huge source of negative energy had been released, and released me from a self-imposed prison of misery, leaving room for new growth to follow, as those grass sprouts show me the way.

We have lived on this beautiful little patch of ground for over 20 years now, and I think perhaps I can sometimes get a sense of what the spirit of the land is saying. Right now it is saying Hallelujah! and who am I to argue? I even went out in the rain to take a picture of our outdoor chalice, now full of water, and the gratitude of a couple of our garden statues, and I survived the journey (left my glasses in the house though, let’s not push our luck)!

Let it be a dance.