rain check

The rain seemed especially loud this year. I wondered what had changed -- my sensitivity or the drops themselves. It hasn’t rained much, but when it does, it rains heavily, each drop sounding inexplicably individual, dense and fat, its impact more solid on surfaces, more dramatic, than ever before. Even a light rain is a heavy rain, this year.

Here, and everywhere, there is continuous talk of global warming, how this rock will turn into a desert; in fifty years, they say, we’ll be more Africa than Europe, climatologically speaking. Already, it’s curious to me that Greeks consider my island green. In any case, Crete’s been moving southward for centuries, slowly but surely. Could these factors account for the change in the rain?

At some point I realized that the pattering was concentrated on one end of the balcony. I looked up, and there it was, the explanation I had been searching for inside me and everywhere else, entirely self-evident: the wooden enclosure that the upstairs neighbors had spent most of the summer constructing on their balcony, its corner jutting out in just such a way as to gather the rain and send it plummeting and percussing down onto a hollow plastic gutter very near my flat.

It looks like rain again this weekend. It may be soft this time; it may be hard. I mean that literally. You can go looking for metaphors, but you won’t always find them.