Dear Rain, I can only say this in July

We complain about you the way you complain about family you'd take a bullet for, loudly, constantly, and with a secret, traitorous relief that you'll be back.

Dear Rain,

I want to start by admitting I know you can’t hear me right now, and that’s exactly why I’m doing this. It’s the middle of July. You’ve been gone almost three weeks. For the first time since roughly October I can make plans without consulting you first, and something about that has given me the nerve to say a few things I’d never say to your face, mostly because your face is usually about four inches from mine and dripping.

So. While you’re off wherever you go, bothering Canada, I assume, let’s talk.

You are too much. You know this. Everyone knows it and nobody says it, because you’re always in the room. Nine months. Nine months of the year you’re here, and not even in a dignified, dramatic way. A real storm I could respect. A real storm has a beginning and a middle and an end, makes the news, gets people helping each other. You don’t do storms. You do grey. You do a low, committed, all-day grey that doesn’t fall so much as hang, a mist that isn’t quite rain and is somehow wetter than rain, that gets under an umbrella like it has a grudge. You make three in the afternoon look like dusk. You make dusk look like a threat. You have turned an entire region into people who own four kinds of jacket and hold opinions about Gore-Tex.

And you take the mountain. That’s the part I resent most. On your worst days you reach up and pull the whole mountain behind a curtain and just leave it there, for weeks, until people forget they live under one of the largest volcanoes on the continent. You hide the best thing we’ve got. That isn’t weather. That’s editorializing.

You’re not a guest, is the trouble. A guest leaves. You’re a roommate who moved in before any of us got here, pays no rent, and has strong feelings about our outdoor plans. Every wedding, every ballgame, every Fourth of July, there you are, uninvited, misting on the potato salad. You have personally ruined more school field trips than budget cuts.

And.

And I’ve been sitting here in the dry July air writing you this furious letter, and I have to be honest with you, because a good complaint is honest or it’s nothing.

I don’t know who we’d be without you.

Look what you did. You made all of it green, not a normal green, an aggressive, dripping, unreasonable green, moss on the north side of everything, ferns in the gutters, a forest so thick and dark and alive it looks like it’s guarding something. You keep the mountain white. You fill the rivers the salmon come home to. You packed the snow that melts into the water we drink in August without a thought. Every good thing about how this place looks, you paid for, in installments, all winter, while we complained.

You made the people, too. We’re indoor people up here, makers of things, readers of books, keepers of small warm rituals, and that was you. You built the coffee hut on every corner; nobody lines up in the rain for a latte in Phoenix. You taught a whole population how to be cozy, which is a real skill and an underrated one. And you did the cruelest, kindest thing of all: you made the summer matter. People in easier climates don’t feel July the way we feel it, because they never lost it. You take it away for nine months, so that when it comes back, this, right now, this gold, this warm, this mountain out every single day, it lands like something we were owed and had given up on. You are the reason a dry Tuesday can feel like a gift.

So here’s where we land, you and I.

I’m going to keep complaining about you, because that’s the relationship. It’s how we do it here. We complain about you the way you complain about family you’d take a bullet for loudly, constantly, with total confidence you’ll be back, and a secret, traitorous relief that you will. You’ll roll in off the water some grey morning in October, no announcement, and settle over the plateau like you never left, and I’ll stand at the window with my coffee and say something unkind about you.

And then I’ll go find a better jacket, and get on with it, and be quietly grateful, because green is a debt, and we owe you every inch of it.

See you in the fall. I mean that as a threat and a thank-you.

Damply yours, Everyone up here

Consider it.

This story first appeared in Beyond Enumclaw, the free Substack newsletter from Enumclaw.com. Subscribe to get new stories in your inbox.