I once wrote that nobody moves to Maine for the weather. No one sane, anyway. At the time I was bitching about Maine’s long, often brutal winters. Today I’m bitching about the rain. Our seemingly endless deluge that has turned mud season into monsoon season. If April showers bring May flowers, then June downpours bring July uproars. Enough already!
The rain pretty much ruined the long July Fourth weekend. Tourists expecting to shop and dine in the Port and frolic in sand and surf under a soothing sun were more likely to be found hunkered down in the movie theater watching “Elemental” for the second or third time with their bored kids.
I chose not to live in Seattle for a reason … endless rain is my least-favorite weather pattern, writes Steven Price. Robert Lowell photo/American Journal
I chose not to live in Seattle for a reason. Gray is not my favorite color. Day after day after day of oppressive cloud cover makes me depressed and claustrophobic. And endless rain is my least-favorite weather pattern. I’d rather have golf-ball-sized hail or a nasty sleet storm, if for no other reason that these weather atrocities are brutal but brief.
Is it just coincidence – or demonic providence – that the current theatrical production at the Ogunquit Playhouse is “Singin’ in the Rain”? My wife saw it. She sat in the third row and got soaked when Max Clayton, in the iconic Gene Kelly movie role, splashed the first few rows of theater goers in the famous song-and-dance number where it “rains” on stage. When she told me about it, all excited, I wondered what was the point? The audience could have simply stepped out of the theater and enjoyed the real thing.
I grew up in the desert, where it almost never rains. And when it does, it seems like some kind of miracle. In fact, if it rains enough, you are treated to a real miracle – a desert bloom. This happens about once a decade. After torrential rain lasting several days, the desiccated seeds of hardy wild grasses and flowers that have lain dormant in the dry desert soil for years and years absorb all this moisture and literally explode into a riot of stunning color and form on the otherwise sere and bleak desert landscape. I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years, and in that time I witnessed a single desert bloom.
Ah, those were the days. OK, the summer sun beat down on you like a hot anvil and the desert wind whipped up nasty dust storms that peeled the paint off your car and got gritty sand in every crack and crevice, including your most private places. But at least in my lapsing memory it was better than getting rained on. Every. Single. Day.
I’ll admit, there was one fine advantage to all this precipitation. We had our own version of a desert bloom around here. Call it a unique rain event. The rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwoods, hawthorns, magnolias, crabapple, and scores of other blooming trees, shrubs and plants put on a magnificent show. Our yards looked as if they belonged in Candyland.
But I’m still grumpy. Am I singin’ in the rain? As in singing its praises. No freakin’ way. Bitchin’ in the rain is more like it. There, I said it. Is the sun out yet?
P.S. When I shared a draft of this essay with my wife, she told me she’d seen a Facebook post in which a wag had photoshopped a picture of the iconic WELCOME TO MAINE, The Way Life Should Be highway sign. Deleting the M and E in MAINE, and adding an R, the sign now read: WELCOME TO RAIN. Got that right.
Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.
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