Something About a Rainy Day
Graphic by Grace McKean
We don’t carry umbrellas in Seattle. Maybe it’s pride, our adaptation to the downpour, or maybe, it’s just plain tradition. Regardless, umbrellas in the rain are infamously meant for tourists and transplants. It is so ingrained into me that shielding myself from the rain is taboo - enough so that I will sacrifice a full face of makeup or freshly done hair to walk into school from my car. It’s just how we are.
Seattle, Washington, is popularly known as one of the rainiest cities on the planet. Going to an out-of-state college has elicited so many questions from puzzled Arizona and California natives on how to manage it. The secret is that even through the months of seasonal depression and gray days, we all love it.
The first rainy day of the dark season usually hits in September. The morning greets you with dew-soaked grass before it begins to fall, and everything smells like earth. That’s one of the best parts about the rain and the humidity. Everything smells green and lush and alive. It’s undeniably distinctive — there isn’t anything else quite like it.
A rainy day feels like a wool sweater. My dad, growing up, was always a massive fan of wool. Wool socks. Wool hats. Wool scarves. It gets cold during this rainy time of year, and I’m convinced every plant-based-hippie-survivalist-PNW father believes that wool is a true gift from God. Every time I slip on a wool sweater, it reminds me of rain battering on car windows and sloshing through puddled streets.
The most meditative element of it all, though, is the sound of rain. The consistent drumming. The variety as a storm surges and subsides, waxes and wanes. Laying in bed, listening to the pattern of raindrops hit the roof above you. There isn’t any form of white noise in the world that can shut my eyes the way rain can. It’s nature’s sleep aid.
A rainy day tastes like hot chocolate, hot coffee, and hot butterscotch all rolled into one. There’s a reason why cafes do so well in Seattle. I believe that something about a downpour drives people to want something warm to wrap their hands around. A steaming cup of something delicious is the soulmate to mother nature’s tears. Warming you from the inside out, there really is no better place or time to indulge. Even when I’m traveling somewhere with a different climate, or locked in the dead of summer, whenever I sip from a burning mug I half-expect to turn towards the window and watch the rain fall from the sky.
Visually, rain is the reason for the beauty of Washington state, along with many other wet, coastal climates. Rain is an aesthetically enhancing life force. There is nothing that compares to such fresh, green scenery. Massive trees, forests of ferns, moss bogs, and rushing rivers are sustained only by the excessive rainfall. It is a gift that comes from the hardship that the clouds create, and it is a tradeoff that is more than well-worth-it.
There is a sensation to it all though, that surpasses the five senses. A quality that can’t quite fit any of them. Rainy days, and living in a place that is flooded with them, has an almost spiritual element to it. It is nostalgia and childhood, it is familiarity. A rainy day is a comfortable blanket to wrap yourself in. Having now lived in a place without much excessive rainfall, there is a gnawing feeling that something is missing from the world around me. Rain fuels a sense of safety and security, and a notion that you are exactly in the right place on this massive planet.