Rainy days

April showers bring May flowers. But what do May showers bring?

The weather has been reflecting my mood. Or perhaps my mood has been reflecting the weather. Chickens and eggs.

I don't dislike it though.

Even after four years in Chicago and a year in New York, I still like watching the rain fall. Any kind of rain. There are different kinds, you know. Warm summer rains, drizzly autumn rains, misty spring rains... I've even cultivated a mild appreciation for those bitter winter rain-sleet-hybrids that always search you out on that one day you happen to leave your scarf or umbrella at home. Snow, of course, is another matter entirely. Excepting the magic of the first snowfall, I find snow tolerable, and only just.

Embrace the rain, shy away from the cold. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in a desert. But as much as I like the rain, I usually prefer to observe quietly from the drier side of the windowpane, preferably with a latte or cappuccino.

I don't know why I find rain so fascinating, but I do.

One of my first memories is (of all things) watching the rain fall on the sidewalk leading to our front door. I remember hearing the thunder rumbling, the dark clouds gathering and blotting out the sun, and I climbed up onto the couch, waiting, patiently, for the first big fat drops to splatter against the cement in quarter size circles. Faster and faster, until the concrete turned a dark, wet grey, and the drops on the windowpane skiied down the glass in crazy zigzags, eating up the smaller droplets like demented snowballs rolling down a vertical hill. Summer monsoons, predictable as clockwork. A first memory, but only the first of many. Why did I collect these particular memories and store them away? I don't know.

Maybe it's because living in a desert is a perpetual reminder of how precarious life is. There is no material possession more prized than water, but you won't remember this until it's not there. In a desert, of course, you remember almost daily. The creosote bushes, the lizards and the rabbits, even those seemingly invincible cacti with their precious treasure locked away in a thick vault of wax, defended by cleverly vicious spines, are always living paycheck to paycheck. Doing without, saving, scrimping, planning, urgently waiting to ease their thirst. The threat of drought looms heavy. Always.

And when it finally rains, it means something. Perhaps that's why people take the time to describe the smell of desert rain. They often call the smell intoxicating or sweet or even tantalizing, when a gust of wind carries the scent of far-off rain for miles, yet not a single drop touches the ground. When it rains, you can smell the desert turning green. Overnight, the ocotillo stalks transform from grey, prickly caterpillars into vibrant green butterflies, their red antennae floating gently in the sky. A single rainstorm can paint the desert overnight in jewel tones that shine almost garishly after such a prolonged, dusty absence of color. A day, and the eyes adjust to the brighter palette and it no longer seems remarkable. A week, and the color fades away gradually. A month, and it is a distant memory and the mountains and the washes wait patiently to bloom again.

Rain brings death to the desert as well. Torrential streams and violent flash floods wreak havoc every year, but when the summer heat becomes unbearable and our postage-stamp size lawns wither into sad, half yellow patches of dried grass, we firmly align rain with life. We danced silly little rain dances on our way home from the bus stop after school and we sang made-up songs to the (non-existent) clouds as we skipped along the asphalt road, the summer sun melting the tar into sticky black pools. If it rained, we would congratulate ourselves on our skills of persuasion and celebrate having coaxed the skies into breathing some life back into the wash behind our houses where we would build forts and play after school until dinnertime. By the time we convinced the summer monsoons to make an appearance, it was usually too late for our sad little lawns, but we never played there, so we didn't care much. In any case, we spared hardly a single thought of the damage rain could bring. The unrelenting, grim scepter of drought loomed much more threateningly than the occasional freak flash flood.

Maybe that's why I was so startled last fall when I was browsing through the Free Bird Farm blog and found a post begging for the rain to stop. Too much rain? What an embarrassment of riches. But as I read further, I realized rain could be just as indisious and destructive as drought. While Arizona burned up in flames last summer, as usual, upstate New York dissolved away under the unrelenting rains.

Hurricane Irene stripped away the topsoil on several farms, leaving bare rock and no hope for summer or fall crops. Though other farms survived the hurricane, the topsoil grew waterlogged from the drizzle that persisted through the whole season and crops succumbed before the farmers could bring them to their CSA members' boxes or farmer's market stalls.

I was here that summer. I holed up in my apartment for Hurricane Irene, armed with two boxes of pasta, a plastic carton of salad greens, a bottle of cheap wine, and my stranded parents. I can't tell to this day whether they were more horrified by the hurricane or by the state of my pantry. In any case, I don't recall feeling particularly worried about anything at all. Even the next day, when reports of the damage filtered through, I scoffed and brushed it off. After all, it had only sprinkled in Manhattan and all the sand bags and preparation seemed silly in the post-storm daylight. It wasn't until I read the Free Bird Farm blog post that the impact hit home.

When you live in a city, you don't really feel the urgency of the weather the same way you do when you're not in the city. Everything can be controlled, mostly. Thermostats and windows, sand bags and plywood boards, supermarkets and 24-hour delis. You forget that life normally depends on forces that are completely out of your control. The sun, the rain, hail, sleet, frost, insects and fungus are just a few stumbling blocks for the farmer and his or her crops.

Yet for us, the consumers, the threats register only faintly, if at all. I can't recall the last time I paid close attention to the day-to-day weather. Most of the time, my thoughts revolve around the need for a coat or umbrella. When I eat, I rarely think about how many potential disasters were overcome for that vegetable to land successfully on my plate. Sometimes, I even get upset because there's a bug-size hole or a sneaky aphid stowaway hidden in one leaf of lettuce. But if I think about it, it's really a miracle that an entire head of lettuce even made it to my fridge with just one insect-size meal missing or with just a lone stray passenger clinging to one leaf.

All this made me think about how the average consumer might react to their first CSA box. Perhaps the novelty coats the first box in a friendly rose-hued tint. But the second? Third? I wonder how many people react positively when a natural disaster hits or when a host of insects decides to snack on a crop of kale intended for the next CSA share box. How many people have romanticized the concept of a CSA, only to grow disillusioned and angry when they receive a CSA share that doesn't live up to their supermarket-cultivated aesthetics or their hipster conception of "local-food"? Or when they just don't receive a share at all or when a season is cut short (as was the case with the farmers whose topsoil was completely washed away)? The whole premise of a CSA is that we're all in this together. This is why I think it's such a great idea for CSA's or their farm partners to have a blog, if only to bring the reality home to us.

I think anyone considering joining a CSA should take the time to read through an entire season's worth of blog posts from a CSA. Any CSA. It's worth doing, if only to get a sense of the vagaries of Mother Nature that are a part and parcel of the CSA experience. So maybe you didn't get heirloom tomatoes this year. Maybe you recieved more garlic scapes than you think you'll ever eat in a lifetime. So? Take it in stride and think of it as an exercise in creativity. (And remind me of my own advice later this summer, please. I may need it or risk hypocrisy. Ha.)

I guess it does help that I grew up in a desert and lived in snowy Chicago for several years before ending up in the concrete jungle. I don't take good weather for advantage and I know how hard it is for things to grow according to plan. After all, nature intrinsically has no plan. And that's the beauty and the fun of it. But if we have another season like last year (knock on wood), I may have to rebalance my affection for the rain. Frosty weather, of course, is still out.