Learning to love the rain

When you’re a gardener in a province where you can’t count on back-to-back days of summer sun, you quickly learn to keep a close eye on the forecast.

I’ve heeded frost warnings in July, watched through the window as a whole bed of red lilies were stripped of their petals by a lashing wind, and had plants crushed under the weight of pounding rain.

Trying to coax roses and peonies and irises to flourish in unpredictable and often unseasonable weather is no pastime for a pessimist.

That’s why, when you get a run of sunny weather, it gladdens your heart. It means you’ll be able to get your hands in the dirt and work in comfort, but also that — once the tough slogging is done — you can enjoy the results of your labour outside on a fine summer evening.

It’s a lovely thing to sit surrounded by beds of flowers and blossoming shrubs in your own garden, watching the birds and the bees and the butterflies, inhaling the roses’ luxurious perfume.

It’s satisfying. As blogger Maria Popova writes, “Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being…”

Still, lately, I’ve been developing a new appreciation for rain.

I’ve always enjoyed a warm summer rain, particularly if it falls at night and you can listen to the pitter-patter on your bedroom window, and not during the day when you hope to get some gardening in. Plants need water, after all.

But recently, when it rained on a Sunday and thwarted my plans for weeding, I began to see rain in a new way.

There’s something exciting and yet strangely comforting about witnessing a sudden downpour, hearing the pounding of the relentless rain — particularly when you’re on the inside looking out.

You know that plants that were in desperate need of water are being refreshed.

Sitting at a restaurant on the pedestrian mall sipping tea, watching drops of rain drip onto white tables from red umbrellas, you are content knowing there’s nothing that you absolutely have to do and nowhere you have to be.

You watch a toddler walking with her dad take confident steps. A boy whizzes by on a skateboard. A couple strolls past with a pair of elegant greyhounds wearing red and yellow slickers. No one seems to mind getting wet.

There’s something calming in the rain, something hypnotic in the metronomic tick, tick, tick of the droplets hitting hard surfaces.

Then, outside, the freshness of it all — the clean, crisp mineral scent of rain on stone, the slick grass, water pooling on the steps next to the courthouse.

Later, out walking, you see how rain bejewels a garden.

The sedums cradle the round drops like something precious. The hostas funnel the water down through their elephantine leaves to their roots. The heavy-headed peonies welcome the downpour graciously, bowing deeply from the waist. Rain glistens on rose petals like diamonds.

It softens the noise of the city, leaving only the sound of it hitting the trees, your footfalls, your beating heart.

American folk singer/ songwriter Dar Williams says it best, in “The Beauty of the Rain”:

“This is your favorite kind of day

It has no walls, the beauty of the rain

Is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls.”