The weather here is breaking my heart

Today, I woke up around 5 a.m. and it was raining. I sat out on the sun porch and drank coffee and hoped it would stop raining. I can't stand for it to rain in Cape Town. I enjoy a good rain in Nashville, especially a big thunderstorm, and I had no problem with rain in Atlanta, but here the weather is breaking my heart.

When I wake up and I can see from my bed on the floor that the sky is bright blue over the mountain, then I am automatically hopeful. Not even hopeful about anything special, but just hopeful. When I wake up and it is raining, I just wander downstairs and sit on the sun porch and wonder if I will even survive it. And it's not like I have bad days when it's raining here. There have been plenty of good days, rain or not. There's just something heavy about the weather here. The clouds come in low off the mountain, and they seem to go on forever. They are also fast and mercurial and unpredictable.

Every morning, Gogo announces the newspaper's predictions about the rain. It's never "partly sunny" or "partly cloudy;" it's always a percentage. "Today will be sixty percent!" she declares triumphantly, and sets her hand down on the paper. Or, when it is already raining, "Today will be one-hundred percent!" Often she follows up the paper's prediction with her own more informed feeling about the weather. "Ah girl," she says to me, "they say sixty percent, but I know it will not rain!" That's what she said yesterday. So I did my wash and hung everything out on the clothesline, all blue sky and happiness. But then there I was ten minutes later, filled with doom, bringing it all back in. In the rain.

It's not like I don't have an umbrella. I do, and I also have a nice new red raincoat, and a sturdy rain hat. I came prepared for rain, just like everyone told me to. I don't know why the sky here has got such a hold on me. When it is beautiful here, it is really beautiful. When the sky is clear and the air is crisp, I am in love with Cape Town and everything else, and all of South Africa seems full of promise. When it is dark and pouring rain, I am the jilted lover of a capricious sky, and I just want to mope around and feel sorry for myself for nothing in particular.

I love both these skies, though. I love the way the rain really rains, and the way it disappears right away when it is finished. I love how the sky gets such a deep blue, and that when you're at the shore, the sky and the sea seem to compete for the most vivid blue around. I love that when it is raining, all the windows in this house stand open and you can hear every drop. I love the little fruits that dangle from the tree outside my bedroom and hang onto heavy drops of water long after the rain has finished. Today the weather may break my heart, but tomorrow it will be all I ever dreamed. Either way it will have hold of me somehow.


While I write this post at my desk, the sky pours rain. It is 4:32 p.m.

I look up from the computer at 4:40 p.m., and the blue sky is back and acting like nothing ever happened. As always, I take it back with wide open arms.

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In other news at 18 Firfield Road:

I am posting these pictures for Jasmin and Aravinda in Canada, gracious owners of this house. Today their friends Ethena and Henry dropped by for tea and cake and a visit with Gogo, and, because I came in from shopping as they were talking, with me, too. We wanted to share our fun visit with our absent Canadian wonderful spirits, so these are for you!


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In further news, Pearl was sick today, home from school with an ear infection. She can really play it up. I could see her weighing her options in her head: she could look pathetic and earn my pity now, or she could pull herself together and get healthy quick for a piano lesson later on. She chose to look increasingly pathetic. Good job, Pearl. Piano tomorrow, then.