"Rain Falls, Angry on the Tin Roof" -- Bradley Robert Mock singing Edwin McCain

(warning: overly poetic and overall boring subject matter) 

The rain here is of a completely different caliber than the rain at home.

In upstate New York, the light, peaceful autumn rain strokes the leaves and gently cloaks the ground in mist. The weather is gray and damp; the cold taste of decay sticks to the back of your throat.

Here, the rain slams into the ground like millions of angry fists, punishing roads and roofs, turning trenches into torrents; threatening hot, dry afternoons with distant rumblings of thunder.

In New York, the rain starts slowly, sometimes as what we love to call a 'drizzle'. It builds a crescendo the same way you start a fire, feeding the ground small bits of water at a time- giving what lives below the clouds time to breathe before breaking into a full, furious downpour.

Here, there are spastic starts, stops and spurts- as if someone is sprinkling the rain to test where it will fall. And one pregnant moment later, it all comes down. Not just buckets. Not just cats, or dogs. But unfathomable fathoms of water. The thunderous rain makes me picture my house trapped under an enormous waterfall.
Like a cruel child, the force of the water dunks it under, preventing its emergence. My house, it's drowning. The rain pounds violently for only eight or ten minutes before slinking off into the distance, followed by a few more smatterings of late-coming clouds.

It is exciting, in a way, to be so captivated by an act of nature as benign as rainfall. The sound is so loud it permeates every activity. If I am teaching and a storm begins to break, I must pause my lecture- allowing my students to glance nervously out the windows, wondering if they will have to walk the many miles home in the sky's sudden tantrum. At home, the noise prevents me from doing anything at all but listen and eventually move to a window to watch the trees in my concession whip around- as I've always enjoyed doing in the States. I only write this now that the rain has stopped, and the crickets have taken up singing again.

Adam Morey once told me he loves autumn, because everyone suffers through the heat and the humidity of summer while the flowers flourish. But at least, he says, there's fall- and that's when "the plants get theirs." Here, there is no fall. There is only rain, and no rain. Flood or famine. The plants 'get there's' the same as those who depend on them. It is why deforestation is such an issue here. Tropical rainfall is so heavy and brutal that you need those trees and plants to hold the soil together or it, and all of the vital minerals in it, will be washed away in seconds.

Also, there is no way Edwin McCain ever had a tin roof. If he did he wouldn't write pop panty-droppers. He'd write wooden drums and the sound of a reedy voice in the distance, thanking god for the rain.