Never mind what the calendar says. The new year started today. At one Kat and Matthew and I sat eating lunch on the bay shore, north of us a pale slice of aquamarine veiled by clouds. One looked dark and familiar, and to none of us in particular I said “that is a rain cloud.”
The slight mist that wet this afternoon’s streets hardened by the time I got home, and the rain came rather unambiguously down. Not enough to drench, not enough to wet a face hidden beneath the brim of a ball cap, but enough to stud the dog’s fur with bright jewels to shake off in a spray beneath the sodium vapor lamps. We walked out under the plane trees, drops sounding timpani off their leaves.
Rounded hills and oaks spell home, Kat said a few days back, and she was right. This country is home more than New York State ever was, and I was born there. But it took me a year or two to acclimate to the dry. Rain boils up out of the landscape in summer where I was born, humidity hanging like sheets over the lakes, and if it does not rain every few days in summer the world ends.
My first summer in Berkeley, it rained in August. It was unseasonable and odd, unsettling to the Californians, and I reveled in it, running up and down Berkeley Way in my bare feet.
There is a rhythm to the rain here, a pulsing of years. This is home. Zeke has made it through another dry and we stood together tonight beneath the plane trees and watched drops gather on the leaves, fall to the walnut trees below. A salamander strode across the street, an Ensatina roused for the first time in months by this first rain, looking around as though he didn’t quite believe it either.
One season opens, another ends. This is the start of the new year, when the seeds lain dormant in the soil begin to quicken, and another few days of good rain will see the first orange poppies sprouting. The creek is still running. Fed by last winter’s epochal storms, it never quite became the usual series of green pools but still ran singing to salt. It sings a bit more loudly tonight, and I will go and run its length and breathe it in, a little, and wipe the spray from my beard and shiver.
A few more rains and the wet will begin in earnest. A downpour or two and the coho will nose past the shoals, start climbing the coastal streams. Live oaks will shake off their dust, sprout new leaves beneath the old. My little hill is breathing tonight, rain raising shivers of remembrance along its flanks, water seeping into the rock to mix with rains long ago fallen. When this wet season stops, in May or thereabouts, I will walk past drying patches of miner’s lettuce with my old dog or watch the creek dwindle again without him, and sigh to think how he would have liked to splash in next year’s warm and algal pools.
