That would be the rain. The blogs down our way, like Erin all the way over in San Pedro to the east and Jen all the way over in San Ramon to the west, are talking ’bout endless rains. The past few weeks in particular. It’s been raining HARD and LONG. It’s 9pm now and it’s been raining pretty much non-stop since around one. Big loud drops and plenty of ’em. The video is a drop in the bucket and it didn’t record the huge thunder roll that happened near the end…

You wake to a beautiful sunny day, bright blue sky, bright green grass, birds singing: Gorgeous. By 11am, it’s getting cloudy. By the time the rains start a couple hours later, our house is usually IN the clouds. Big fog. Loud rain. Droning on and on… It puts you right to sleep. I haven’t had such a hard time staying awake since the last time Hal tried to explain inflation to me.

Funny, we are high enough at 4000′ here to have the famous Costa Rican t-shirt days and comforter nights. High enough to be in the clouds during the height of the rainy season, but not so high and so wet that our house is mildewy. When we were looking for a house, we decided if it had a fireplace, it was too high for us. Cold enough for a fireplace means a wet house in the rainy season. That’s probably not a completely fair analysis, but it worked for us. Living by the ocean all that time was wet enough, thank you very much. We didn’t want to be wet and cold.

When the rainy season started this year, we were all so grateful. Last year’s wet season was not. It was more like a damp season. Last year, there wasn’t a rainstorm over four hours and that was rare. Apparently, the year before that was almost as dry. By 2007 May 1, official start of the green season, you just felt parched. The earth, your skin, the asphalt – everything hot and DRY. The only people enjoying the bone-dry fields were the local juvie pyromaniacs.

Guanacaste
In Guanacaste, where Mel Gibson just bought a $25Million finca [FEEN-kah, farm], it’s so dry, they ship in water. There’s a woman over there sitting on a property full of exotic palms and she brings in two truckloads of water EVERY DAY. I wonder if Mel Gibson knows how his garden is going to grow eight months of the year?

This year’s rains, in the central valley at least, is making up for the last two years’ dry spells. Gotta be. There is so much water here, it’s gotta be soaking right thru to… um, whatever country is opposite us on the globe. Google didn’t know and my personal encyclopedia is asleep.

Everyone says, in a real rainy season, by the time November rolls around, you are ready for it to be over, desperate for the rains to end. I’m not yet. Not even close. I love these sleepy afternoons, cloudy cozy early evenings, the sound of rain pounding on our tin roof, bright green beautiful mornings. Mowing the lawn every other week. Almost 10pm. Still raining.


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