Rain

Rain in these gray parts conjures melancholy with as much success as witches at a cauldron conjure dancing devils.

The tentative pat pat pat on the windows, the bone-chilling cold outside that seeps through every crevice, trying to overtake the warmth inside, is sadness personified.

This isn't the rain of my tropical landscapes, those fat pebble-sized drops that bang on zinc roofs, like the wild percussionist in a rock band, hitting the oversize green plantain leaves like a volley of transparent golf balls.

That rain falls in plain sunlight to signal that the brujas se están casando. On my Caribbean island, the rain drops form a traveling curtain that hits you one moment and passes through you and is gone in another. The witches, they say, get married when the sun is out and it's raining. Perhaps that's why it rained a little on my wedding day, just as my father and I started walking down the amapola-flanked "aisle" toward the cabaña at the beach where the ceremony was held in Guánica.

Just like there is a sun in the Midwest and a Sun in the Caribbean, there is the rain in these parts and then there is a tropical rain. The one in my life up here is mostly a melancholy rain, one that brings with it the murmurings of sad memories. The one of my life down there is a lively rain, one that laughs with you as you get drenched in celebration.

My father always had a trick against the rain. Anytime he got rained on, he'd take the comb out of his pocket and run it through his dark hair. His theory was that the body wouldn't know the difference between that and a shower if he did exactly what he did after showering, which was to comb his hair. This trick he has credited for years for never getting colds after getting soaked in a rain shower.

My mother, on the other hand, has never been a friend to rain. In her family, her grandfather died after a particular virulent rain (complicated by malaria, it turns out). Thus, getting rained on to her is akin to summoning Death.

My husband, good West Virginia country boy that he is, scoffs at rain. We just walked the dogs and while I, my mother's daughter, had my trusty baseball cap, my hooded fleece-lined rain jacket and an umbrella, he just had a baseball cap and a jacket and, as usual, refused anything else.

The dogs, these former Puerto Rican street urchins, hate the rain. Tonight, after they went about their business, the dogs signaled that they were ready to come back home even though we were not even halfway through their usual walk. I've heard of breeds who love to get wet. Not these mutts. These two like to be warm and cozy inside. I guess they remember the times, before we came into their lives, when they spent many a rainy day without shelter.

I don't like getting wet in the rain. I remember one motorcycle ride my husband and I took into the mountains many years ago in Puerto Rico and it rained almost the entire trip. I was miserable. And while I can't remember any time in my adulthood that I've been actually pleased to get rained on, I do remember those days of my Puerto Rican childhood when we'd go out of the house in the hard rain to get soaked and play and slide on the tiled porch and swim in the flooded street, like it was a great big river.

It's the memory of those happy, carefree rains that I recall now, as the melancholy rain outside insists with its plaintive pat pat pat, pat pat.