NOTICE / January 8 2018

It's raining today. A lot. A news headline mentioned it hasn't rained so much in San Francisco since 2014. Bizarre that that was four years ago. Freaks me out how much time goes by without me noticing. 

Rain reminds me of our house in Redwood City. We had a large window that looked out on our front yard and out to the tree-lined street. Pushed up next to the window was a long, grey sofa with blue and pink embroidered spots. There must have been a winter sometime in the early nineties with a lot of rain because I can distinctly feel the textured, wool couch as I sit perched looking out the glass at the downpour outside, content to watch, to listen, to smell the wet tanbark and leaves. Our street was on a slight hill and the water rushed down the gutters in smooth gliding streams. I know roughly when in my life that moment was, based on the house we lived in, how large the sofa is in my memory, but other than that it's stuck suspended in a non-time of endless, perfect stillness. 

That is where my love of sheets of crisp rain and leaves on the pavement, comes from. It is the sense of safeness, the kind that one can only know in childhood. A parent in the other room, the house feels large, like an entire world, that is yours and free and warm. The rain is thick, pattering, drowning out all other sounds. Schedules are postponed, days are re-arranged, plans are softened.

Looking out of my office window today, even at work, on a deadline, that feeling of safety and calm comes over me because of the rain. The coziness, but also the perceived cleanliness that follows. Fresh and new, like childhood. A cleansing we can never actually have, but can only taste in instances of rain, fresh snow, early morning. I am always a little bit melancholy when the sun finally comes out, when time keeps moving on.