Gift of RA

This is Wednesday, the day I go to my networking breakfast group.  We meet at 7:30 for breakfast and have a 30 second commercial, then a 5 minute speaker and a 15 minute speaker.  I am scheduled for a 15 minute in 3 weeks, then Carol asked if I would do it next week because Dick won’t be there – now why would he want to miss breakfast just to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary with his wife?

Eddie woke me up at 5:15, just before he left to volunteer at the Boeing Archives.  By the time I was ready to go, it was 0 dark thirty and not only dark, but raining too.  Not my favorite combination. Fortunately it wasn’t a hard rain, plus I noticed in the light of my little LED flashlight I could see the rain – like little lighted pins or thin rods that have rainbow colors.  I would like to stand still and study it, but I had to go – plus I would have gotten wet.  So I left for breakfast and was glad it wasn’t a torrential rain in the dark – been there, done that, don’t like it.

I remember a day in the 80’s when I was doing speeches for the Connecticut Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation.  It was a school and I wasn’t sure what to say to the kids, so I decided to think of it from their experiences.  It was during daylight and I had not been there before, so I was trying to find my way in the downpour where I could hardly see through the windshield.  The wipers weren’t doing a whole lot for me, but it would have been worse if I didn’t have them going.

I will say that all of us are so glad the fog is gone, there isn’t that feeling of the ceiling slowly coming down on me, almost squishing me as it comes close to the ground.  The air had gotten very stagnant, so there was a burn ban – now we can have a fire and the air is a lot cleaner.  We have even seen some sun, sometimes bits of it here and there, some times a whole morning or afternoon.

When I was out last Friday the sun went in and out of the clouds, one of those times when the clouds were snowy white to dark and all the values in between.  It was amazing, I wish I could have used my camera, but I needed to keep my eye on the road.  If we have sun and clouds, I rather have the puffy ones where the sun goes in and out than have it look hazy.

It is always amazing to see the rain come across Puget Sound from the West, over the olympic Mountains to us – then goes into the mountains and becomes snow and really bad weather as it makes it way east.  Sometimes we see big black clouds, sometimes they are grey and some have that “I’m going to dump on you” look.  Other times it looks like fog coming across the water, until the rain drops hit our big west-facing windows.  If the wind is strong, it will make those big windows rattle.

It’s been more of a toolie rain today that hard or downpour – but you will get wet is you stay out in it.  When they say there is a 60% chance of rain, I usually say you will only get 60% wet.  That’s the thing about Seattle, we have all kinds of rain – from spit to mist to drizzle to real rain to hard rain to downpour.  Some days it doesn’t do anything, just is cloudy and sulks. It’s not true it takes 6 months to acquire web feet here, it only takes 2 or 3.  Actually, I tell people it rains all day every day here so they won’t come here to live.  I remember saying that all the time I lived away from here.

I lived away from here for 34 years and I so missed the rain and the green.  I missed a large body of salt water and proper mountains, Northern Virginia had 3 mountain ranges but they were bumps on the landscape next to the Olympics.  It was hard to be in For Wayne and Atlanta where there weren’t any mountains and in Atlanta Lake Lanier was just a squiggly man-made lake – no body of salt water.  Felt a little landlocked in some places.  Really made me appreciate the Pacific Northwest and Washington (the real one).

I will take rain drops over the flakes and the icy stuff any day.