Creek Running North

It rained on us last night, huge drops doing their best to blister the paint from our house. We were snug. Our errands run, we were safe and dry indoors. There are few things as comforting as drifting off to sleep with the one you love, a furious but ineffectual rain pelting your home.

The National Weather Service serves Pinole poorly. You can choose data from Napa, Oakland, or Concord, none of them more than half an hour’s drive away during rush hour, and all of them receiving quite different amounts of precipitation in a typical storm.

Absent the aid of a giant Federal bureaucracy to give me the information while I sit at the keyboard, I have been forced to resort to other, extralegal means to determine how much rain fell on us this weekend. I was weeding the garden on Saturday, using a five-gallon plastic bucket to hold the weeds I pulled between trips to the compost pile. The bucket had an inch of water in it just now.

The rain really came down last night, metaphorical buckets of it, and it turned to snow as it blew east over the mountain passes I plan to cross tomorrow. Right now, the cops are requiring chains on all vehicles going over Donner Pass. I imagine fishtailing tomorrow over treacherous mountain passes in my pickup. Hi, Mom.

Every year, more or less, it rains on the Bay Area in the month of May. Every year, more or less, a good soaking rain prompts the evening news to run interviews with people in the street, who say “it never rains this late! Come on, it’s May already!”

We actually get, in an “average” May, about half an inch of rain. The above-mentioned federal bureaucracy that supplies that figure doesn’t say whether that “average” is a mean or a median. Either way, it means that it’s not unusual for us to get more than half an inch of rain in May. 

Ten years ago today, Becky and I were watching the skies rather nervously. It was a rainy May, and our outdoor wedding was planned for the 20th. We had something like a hundred invited guests, and while we could have fit them into the building we’d rented for the reception, it would have cramped our style a bit.

It rained May 18, just a little bit. On May 19 it cleared, and we spent the whole day outside putting together the table centerpieces: little two-inch pots of herbs which (for some reason) Becky decided needed repotting into four-inch pots before they were put into baskets and covered with Spanish moss. (In retrospect, this may have been a project intended to keep me busy.)

This was a wedding for which the bride did everything but the cooking. She sewed her own dress — a white modified cheongsam — and those of the bridesmaids and Allison, our flower child. She dyed everyone’s shoes. She made the little box affixed to Zeke’s collar in which he’d carry the rings down the aisle, with the flower girl on the other end of the leash. She put together the wedding favors: bags of cooking spices from Penzey’s, each in a little muslin bag (which she sewed) tied with a ribbon (by guess who) to a small card with a poem about spices and life and a recipe (which she selected and printed out.) I had suggested we cater the thing by handing my dad some tongs, a few bags of charcoal and forty or fifty pounds of hot dogs. She gave me one of those looks. She assembled the floral sprays for the walls of the Brazilian Room. She put together a stereo system on which we would play the mix of wedding music I was assigned to compile. ("Cheaper than a DJ, and we’ll still have it afterwards.” I did help with the shopping on that one.) She worked late into the night on May 19, doing some crucially important task or other that no one else would note. Curling ribbons into bows, or ironing shoe tongues, or something.

I woke at three or three-thirty the morning of our wedding to the sound of rain nearly breaking our windows. I went back to sleep.

Day broke with a slight mist, and we were too busy to worry about it. We drove to the wedding in separate cars, not out of tradition but because of division of tasks. The grass was wet when Allison, Zeke and I got to the site, and a few drops fell. I set up chairs outside anyway. As the first guests started to arrive, the looming clouds broke up. The sun came out just enough to dry the patio, carefully staying behind a cloud so as not to shine in our guests’ eyes.

Becky didn’t do all the work. We hired a caterer after all, and a bakery for the cake — though I did prune the redwood twigs used to decorate it from a tree in the park around the corner. Becky gave me a few other things to do, as well. I made the mix tape. I shaved.

And I wrote the vows, a couple days beforehand after we’d argued bitterly over some stupid thing, realizing as I stormed down the street that any wedding vows we could agree on in anger would probably serve us well. Our friend Mark Gorrell, a Universal Life Church minister, read them as the sun tried to burn through the dwindling clouds:

Will you, Becky and Chris, maintain balance in your life together, remembering when to differ, when to speak with one voice, when to support one another, when to challenge one another, when to sing together, when to be silent together, and when to listen one to the other?

Will you, Becky and Chris, honor one another in your marriage, seeking neither dominion nor submission but equality, nurturing and feeding each other, each allowing the other to grow, treating one another as your chosen partner in your journey through your time on earth?

Do you, Becky and Chris, by the power inherent in you as man and woman, pronounce yourselves husband and wife?

We did. We still do.

On May 19, 1995, we realized late in the day that Becky wanted a spray of flowers to carry down the aisle. We had nothing. We drove in a hurry to a garden I’d planted outside my workplace, and there a Cleveland sage was in full bloom. But if we’d cut stems and carried them home dry, the flowers would fall off before the ceremony. I had been doing a little weeding in that garden the week before, and had been using a five-gallon plastic bucket. It had about an inch of fresh water in it. It rode home full of sage in the cab of the pickup truck. Becky carried it the next day, brilliant purple corollas against pale gray leaves, its heady herbal aroma still clinging to her as we danced to a Mexican waltz.

We have a large hedge of that sage in front of our house now. It flowers more profusely each year. On a day like this, when an average May rain freshens the leaves before the sun comes out, our wedding sage is redolent enough to perfume a whole block. Or a whole life.