RAIN!

What you're raised with seems natural. What may be natural elsewhere seems strange if you weren't raised with it.

I was born and raised in Southern California. So were my siblings, and unusually enough, my parents. My mother was born in 1917, my father in 1922. They're both gone now, but their childhood experiences were similar to mine, in the way that we were molded by our environment.

Like children everywhere, especially ones who do not travel much, I thought that what I grew up with was the normal pattern of the world.

The thing most people who do not live there do not understand about Southern California is that Winter is the rainy season. Rain may start as early as October, but usually there is little measurable rain until November. After March, rain is not the norm, although there are occasionally some April showers.

After that, IT DOES NOT RAIN IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. For a period of six to seven months, there will usually be less than one inch of measurable precipitation.

That was the weather pattern my parents grew up with. That was the weather pattern I grew up with. That was what I understood to be normal.

Rain does not fall in the summertime.

After I married, my husband began taking me to other parts of the country. If our trips occurred in the Summer-time, my first purchase was usually an umbrella.

I don't understand Summer rain. In Southern California, thunderheads would sometimes build up over the mountains, but rain did not fall in the valleys. If I heard thunder once a summer, that was an event.

Rain, the rain I knew, fell in the winter, and was generally cold. You bundled up, not only against the wet, but also against the cold of the winter moisture.

Now, I often run out to feel the rain in the summertime. I watch it in a sort of awe. Here, now, the rain comes in showers, short, sometimes hard bursts that may last only five minutes. The long, drizzling soaks of my childhood don't happen with the rain here. Summer rain is different. The sky can cloud up in a brief span of time, bring a measurable amount of rain, and then clear.

And lightening! And thunder! Not an occasional very distant rumble, but big flashes and big, loud bursts and claps.

I have a childlike awe and appreciation of the summer rain. It is (to me) something so totally new and different from anything I experienced before.

It still doesn't seem natural, though.