For most of my life I never thought much about rain except as a spoiler of events: picnics, ballgames, graduations. Then I moved to Florida, where rain is an event.
I arrived in August and watched, mesmerized, as it fell as if shot from guns. I had never seen rain fall so hard. And, because my new home state was a subtropical peninsula, I usually didn't have to wait too long between shows.
Years later I stood on the beach with visitors from France to watch the departure of the Queen Mary. The skies opened up and instead of running for cover, the French wallowed in the deluge. They had never felt warm rain before.
One August I traveled around Greece for three weeks and never saw a cloud. Forget a drop; there was not a hope of rain. Returning from the airport, I walked onto our balcony at the start of a cloudburst, and held out my hands to feel the wet.
Yesterday brought another lovely precipitation memory: the flat, steady, unruffled rain of a hurricane that was history.
