Rain, Rain!

Long ago, I used to work with a gentleman some of you may remember–a very gentle man, named Ray Falconer. He was a meteorologist, the weather guru on public radio, and he used to give the most amazingly detailed and enthusiastic weather reports I’ve ever heard. Rain, sun, cloudy, mild, hurricane, fog, hail, whatever–the guy just loved weather. If you bumped into him and casually remarked “Nice day,” you had to be prepared to listen to a twenty-minute dissertation on high pressure and warm fronts.

Thanks to Diane Hale Smith for this beautiful photographic collage.

Anyway, he once told me that in the course of his research he had looked over the statistics for the past several decades, and he claimed that what we had long suspected was actually true: it does rain more on weekends.

He was talking about Albany, NY, but I think it’s probably a global phenomenon–the weather gods just know when there’s a parade scheduled, somehow. But after a long haul of (gorgeous, sunny, warm) extremely dry weather, you can see the plants drinking the rain in with such eagerness. Everything is growing visibly, almost audibly. So I guess we’ll have to put up an umbrella over the barbecue grill this weekend, and enjoy the beauty of the rain.