Outside, It’s Still Raining

Rambling About the Rain and Memory

It’s been raining here for what feels like weeks but it’s only been just over one. The news won’t stop talking about it. I see endless reposts of the San Lorenzo river and smaller streams heading to the ocean carrying entire trees, or spilling out over their edges. There are innumerable photos of the floods across the cement strewn central valley, cars full of water, or others driving away from rising waters due to the king tides. And yet, this storm, what feels like an endless feedback loop of bomb cyclones turning to atmospheric rivers, is not even close to the most rain ever in California, though it is inches very close to the yearly average already.

It’s still wet where I live. The rain comes in and out along with hints of thunder that I mistake for a jet passing above until it becomes so loud I wonder what the lightning must’ve hit in my neighborhood. Every twelve hours or so I’ll see the cement dry while everything else remains soaked, and I wonder how the stray cat in the backyard is doing. 

Yes, the rains are here, but I’m living away from streams so I don’t see so clearly what the pouring waters are causing. The closest thing on my street to calamity has been a small mudslide that barely fell to the road. I have seen little of what the news portrays where I live, but the news seeks drama, and where I live it’s mostly peaceful.

It’s true this storm feels different. However now, unlike in the past few years, we have social media that works even faster, and perhaps the magnitude of it is only heightened by the images we see, the videos we watch, and the facts endlessly repeated on our phones.

We have been without so much rain for a while. The creek behind my mom’s house is growing fuller as the rains come harder. The incessant winds the past couple of days and the groaning of water against windows and rooftops has made me wonder when the last time I could remember a storm like this, and I can’t. What confuses though, what nags me about this storm, is that there is something normal, or at least already known about it. Basically, it feels like the storms I remember when I was little.

Most of us, likely, have been wowed and, if you’re living through it, grown bored of it—the rains are holding us in. It’s not really too bad, at least where I am. It’s just inconvenient for us. Some of us might think of this as an anomaly, some event spurred on by climate change (which I would be surprised to hear climate change played no part in these storms). Again, it feels like a normal winter storm like the ones I remember so well growing up—watching and listening to the rain pound on classrooms, running after puddles or throwing things in the flooded creeks to see how fast they’d run away. There would be days of power outages every couple of years in my town and we’d go for long rain walks eventually heading home to make hot chocolate and, if the power had yet to fail, watch a movie and look at the rain through the window. 

Once, driving with my mom after a storm we watched a working traffic light switch from red to green as it dangled from its cord, telling us to go—trees on the road downed, debris from a near total flooding scattered across the pavement.

Aside from the short rains in December of 2021, it’s been years since we had a storm like this, one that seems to fill everything to the brim. But it’s not necessarily abnormal for deluges such as this. So why does this feel different? Is it the knowledge of why this might be happening? Could that be all—that we now know of climate change and have seen its effects so we see these rains both as a blessing for the crops and reservoirs that feed us and a manifestation of what we have done and are doing to the climate? Is it really that simple?

Maybe I’m misremembering. It’s easy to see the past as something simple that you can latch onto when there are so few memories left in your mind. From the few images that remain we can construct all kinds of falsehoods about our lives as we once lived them. What’s more, it seems that California state data shows that rainfall is in general the same, but has become more and more erratic since the 1980s, likely due to climate change. So, my memory could be wrong. My memory could be right. I’ve only ever lived in a world with climate change, with instability, and maybe the rains were wild when I was growing up.

So, maybe this is a unique sort of storm, one that will pass and our boredom with it will turn into long when the long dry years come, as they always do, again.