Martha Cargill

People accuse me of being contrary when I say I love this weather, but I don't mind. It's not overcast, it's tropical balmy. It's soft, bunched-up, pearl grey, Maui overcast. It's not grey, it's Paris grey. It won't rain, but if it does rain it will be something soft and transparent. I've worked 12 hours in the rain, I've slept in the rain and today I don't mind the rain, because I know I can go home and put on clean, dry clothes and open the window and listen to the rain; if I choose. I may choose to go for a walk in the rain. I might enjoy getting soaking wet just because I can get dry again and it will be easy; as easy as going home to where I live, where I can afford to live, where I rent a clean, dry space all my own where I am free to be. Where I have stocked with food and blankets and bed, where I have built in space and time and my own. I don't mind the rain, because I can do all these things, and still get soaking wet and still be okay. It is just the rain. I have loved the rain since the summer we cut the hay and it was lying flat in the field to cure when it started to rain. And it rained. I remember my father coming into the kitchen and starting a fit something awful because it was raining on the hay and it was the end of the world (and it might have been for us at the time. To lose the hay crop meant we would have to buy hay and hay was expensive for all the animals and beds to feed; even I understood this as a small child and understood this import and that that was why my dad was so upset.) Still, I remember standing in the kitchen window, listening to the storm above me, staring out at the rain, and thinking, "but Daddy it's only raining." And I felt bad for the rainy day because it was so beautiful. We lived in Washington state and when it rained it rained. I remember looking out into the yard and it was so green it hurt. The apple trees, the pear tree, even the old scrappy little prune tree that was always trying to die, were green and bright and budded and bending over in the rain to accept the rain. The grass was too long and looked like a horses main, standing up in thick green tufts. The sky was heavy and leaden and dark, and in the window I could see reflected the bright, clear primary red of my favorite sweatshirt. It was like the earth was seething and breathing thick blood-dyed color. I have been in love with super saturated color ever since. And with the rain. So no. I'm not being contrary when I say I love the rain. I want to lie down in it and let it soak me to the bone until my blood threads with the trees and my skin dissolves into the dirt and I wash away from it all. I want to be like a ribbon of water threading through a river, made of rain, made of me.

"I have said a good deal more here on what ought to be than on what is: but God forbid I should appear to say, "I know what ought to be, and this is it." But it did and does seem better to shout a few obvious facts (they can never be "obvious" enough) than to meech. The meechers will say, Yes, but do you realize all (or any) of the obstacles, presuming you are (in general) a little more right than merely raving? The answer is, I am sure I don't realize them all, but I realize more of them, probably, than you do. Our difference is that you accept and respect them....Oh. I am very well aware how adolescent this is and how easily laughable. I will nevertheless insist that any persons milder, more obedient to or compromising with "the obstacles as they are," more "realistic," contented with the effort for less, are dreamy and insufficiently skeptical. Those are the worst of the enemies, and always have been."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pg 308-309 James Agee

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

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the rain

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