You need a tin roof for rain. Tiles muffle it, make the rain just something that happens out of doors. You're part of the rain under a tin roof. You can't speak over the noise in a good downpour but who'd want to; you're at the window watching the water washing over the paving. The world is grey and what colour remains is changed - strange olive colours, almost-colours, faded under the cloth of rain.
When I was a child I walked in the rain. I still do when I'm by myself, when the rain is right for walking, steady rain, not the sheeting sort that blinds you, not the lightning sort.
Misty rain is lovely, a world of white around you, or the steady rain that seems to part before you, that drums around you, isolating you from the world more than a few metres away. You can believe that frogs come down in rain, like mushrooms or wireworms inching over the wet grass; that mud spontaneously generates, that trees turn silver and the light turns pale.
After the rain is as strange as the time before it - a clarity as great as the oppression earlier. The light is gold suddenly and the sky deep blue and you can see the green swelling even though you know it's impossible and the air smells like a child that has had its hair washed and you feel like dancing with the grass.
From Jackie French's A Year in the Valley page 272.
image is by Gerard :-[ from flickr
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