Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. ~ Langston Hughes

I love the rain, I love almost everything about it. I love laying in bed and listening to the rain pounding on the roof. I love the feel of the blast of cold air that precedes a downpour at the front end of a thunderstorm. I love watching lightening crack across the sky and the way thunder rumbles my entire being. As a child living in the Northeast, we had a large picture window with a small shelf that ran along the window. I would climb up on that shelf and sit in the window to watch the thunderstorms across the valley. One of the best smells in the world is the smell of fresh earth after the rain.

I’ve been fortunate to have lived and traveled all over the world. As such I’ve experienced so many different kinds of rain. There are the regular thunderstorms that open up every afternoon with regularity in hot and humid Florida summers. There’s the summer thunderstorms that build up in the Northeastern summers after days of heat and humidity, creating giant anvil clouds that climb into the sky. Then, that downdraft of hard cold wind that rips across the land, right before the clouds unleash their fury and drown the world. There is rain in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil that feels like a hot shower and rain in that same forest that you can hear, but gets captured by the canopy and never even touches you. There is the rain after the rain when you’re hiking on a trail. You’ve hidden away from the big rain and after you finally come out to hike again you’re walking along and the wind blows and the rain in the trees suddenly comes crashing down on you out of nowhere, it’s always a surprise blast of chilly water.

When I lived in the Mojave Desert, rain was a blessing, it always came too fast, too hard and never lasted long enough. But rain in the desert brings gifts and I was fortunate to live there one year when the rain came at the right time, and the right amount and the result was a super bloom of flowers.

The only rain I don’t like is the constant cold rain for days that happens in the Western winter or the Eastern spring. I never liked it but then during my first two weeks thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail I got rained on like ten of the first fourteen days. It left me cold and constantly wet, and truly demoralized me. Until the injury that ended my hike, that rain was the only thing that almost truly drove me off of the trail.

Rain hit the Bay Area today, our first real rain of the year and I was excited to go out for my daily walk while the bands of light rain from the storm filtered through, it was wonderful. I have many great memories of being in the rain, one of my best dates involved getting caught in a downpour with only her dog’s car towel for an umbrella. So here’s to the rain and the happiness it brought me today. ~ Rev Kane