Health & Fitness
Rain Rain Go Away!
Tired of the constant rain? A former resident of Maui reflects on the weather here in the Pacific Northwest.
What happened to our warm, semi-sunny weather of the last few days? UGH! Double Fudge! (Imagine me looking up at the sky, with outstretched arms) Nooooooooo!
Here in the Northwest, we are the best sports, next to those Emeror Penguins in Antarctica, when it comes to weather. And especially this year when our non-rainy days, (forget sunny), have been as rare as a Mel Gibson apology. Yesterday, I was selling something out of my garage to a Craigslist buyer who told me that she had friends moving back to California because of the weather here. Their SAD levels had skyrocketed to unsafe levels and they were retreating to sunny Southern Cal.
We know another family doing the same thing this summer, getting out before the rains start again in the fall to plunk us back in the center of Wetville USA. I have to think that this winter was one of the worst we’ve had for continuously rainy days, weeks, months, without even hearing actual statistics. It's been wet and gray for eight months now! I feel like Bella when she first moved to Forks from Phoenix, before Edward became her excuse to endure the weather for her vampire boyfriend's safety.
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As a writer, the icky weather keeps me inside, at the keyboard, so that’s the good part for me. That, and the fact that our area is a brilliant shade of green, almost to the point of having to squint one’s eyes to look into that gorgeous Washington state forest. And I don’t have to worry about how the little creatures in the wild will make it through the drought of winter as I did when I lived on Maui. I used to fear for those mongooses and rats that had to forage for water in the winter. No really. And the stray cats and dogs that live in the sugar cane fields (they don't co-habit, of course, because that would just be weird). There were days when I would look out across the channel between Maui and Lanai, curse at the merciless sun and wish for the reprieve of a misty day when the precipitation would blur the vision of the Pineapple Isle across the way. Truly, I did.
But then living in constant sunshine does things to your mind after a while. Or maybe that was living on a rock in the middle of the Pacific... Hawaii, the most isolated group of islands in the world. If you didn’t leave the rock every once in awhile, anything was possible, including wishing for rain and singing show tunes repeatedly. In Maui, I sometimes hoped for a little rain, especially Christmas Day, just to make the holiday more festive, instead of another day in Paradise, like the T shirts say. If there was one thing I learned from all my years on Maui, it was that no place is absolutely perfect, weather-wise, or vegetationally speaking. Maui gets brown in the summer and works it’s way to green in the winter. But just barely green as seen on the drier parts of the island, like the pali between the airport and Lahaina. Every place has drawbacks, even paradise.
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I lived in Whistler B.C., between Maui and Sammamish and used to get sick of the snow in April, the rain in October, then frustrated that the sun shines only a limited number of hours in the village before it dips behind the mountains again. After having the Maui horizon, Whistler’s sun was like a visitor who came for a good time, not a long time. One year it snowed on my birthday which, if you’re following my blog, you might know was last week. And it stuck around long enough to kill all our pansies and primroses, which were just poking their heads through the dirt in search of the two hours of sunshine each day.
When we moved to Sammamish from Whistler, I originally worried about the constant winter rain but hoped for the best. Roland told me that the summers were worth waiting for. And waiting. And waiting. I'm still waiting for one of those three - four month summers with constant sunshine and heat waves.
This year we have been the champions of waiting, with only a few teaser days when we can say, “Oh, yea. This is why I live here. For spring in February, early planting of the vegetable garden, those T Shirt days in March, cherry blossoms in April and all the greenery 12 months out of the year.” We have spent this long winter/spring of 2010/2011 wondering if the weather was particularly bad, popping Vitamin D like skittles and smiling through the downpour, waiting for sunshine.
If awards were given in America for really good sports about the weather, we’d get top honors this year for the rain. I know we would, and when we stepped up to the podium in our rainboots and Gore-Tex jackets, umbrella’s over our heads, we would be proud of our fortitude, our ability to carry on through the precipitation, in spite of socked-in grayness and sun deprivation syndrome. We’d graciously smile at those Midwest folks who have endured snow but also have occasional days of sunshine all winter long. We'd tell them it was a close race, pat them on their backs and tell them that maybe next year they’ll walk away with the grand prize for being good sports about the weather. Of course everyone at this event, (especially Floridians and Hawaiians), would marvel at how we do it in the soggy Pacific Northwest. Do we spend abnormal time in tanning salons, in front of sunshine lights, take more anti-depressants than the folks from North Dakota, take more trips to California or Hawaii, coach our children to believe that this is normal weather when every day is rainy from October to May?
Yes, probably we do all these things, but we do it with style, good sportsmanship and help from those low airfares to Honolulu. Here in Sammamish where many folks still have a job in this recession, we are able to take our getaways, afford vast amounts of Vitamins D and C and keep ourselves amused with Sounders tickets, trips to Pomegranate for lunch, cable television. We do what we can to make life better and the rain endurable because it is the greenest state in America and that in itself counts for something. That and our fabulous summers.