Rain, Rain, Go Away...

Rain is inevitable nowadays.  Sometimes it rains early in the day, which is okay because it means I can be comfortable as I clean and do all the housework stuff.  Sometimes it rains in the afternoon which is good because then I have an excuse to be alone in my house and read.  Sometimes it rains around dinner/bed-time which is wonderful because then I sit and mess around on the harmonica for a few hours and I know no one can hear me.

It can get tiresome, though, like anything done to excess.  For example, when I want to go visit someone's house for cafecito and instead decide to stay in because it's easier.  Or when I look outside my front door in the evening and there's four pairs of muddy footwear that I'll need to clean the next day.  The worst is the catch-22 of nighttime rain: it gives me a chance to sleep comfortably instead of unconsciously streaming sweat as I toss and turn.  But, and this is a big “but”, it's damn near impossible to sleep underneath a tin roof in torrential rain because of the noise.

“And all I am hearing is rain on my tin roof...”  It's a sweet song, Mr. Avett, but the rain I imagine in the song is the light smattering that makes one happy to have a roof of any type over his head.  The rain on my tin roof sounds like a  battlefield and when it wakes me up it keeps me up.  Add the chickens that freak out and scrabble across the metal and the chirping/laughing lizards in the wooden beams...it's an overwhelming amount of sound happening.  Maybe one day it'll be normal to me, like a kind of white noise.

Phhht.  In my dreams.  Or not, as it turns out.

In the mean time, all I can do is revel in what the aguaceros, or heavy rainfalls, do provide.  This is a part of the country that desperately needs as much water as the powers-that-be decide to send.  Most of Guanacaste's economy (inland, not the fancy resort beaches on the coast) is based on cattle for milk and cheese.  During the dry season, synonym summer, the cows look downright sick they're so thin.  A friend described them as the typical “third world cows” that you might see in evening news reports, footage from a distant country in the throes of famine and drought.  The drought part is right – water is not easy to come by for many months out of the year.  I saw the difference that two early rainfalls made in the pastures and it was incredible.  A bone dry, bare field to a cushy spread of green in three days.

The rain directly or indirectly impacts almost all parts of my life.  Its strange, because now that I think about it, it's like...duh, water's kind of basic.  I've just never lived before in a place where so much of a person's habits were defined by it's arrival or absence.

Oh JESUS there is a BAT in my house and over my head right now!  It is long past time that I was under the mosquito net.  Goodnight.