Why do we always blame it on the rain?

You would have to be pretty oblivious to not have noticed that it has rained an exceptional amount in Charlotte over the past couple of months.  Seems like every time I turn around I’m yanking up my pants, opening my umbrella and dashing for my car.  Most of the time, we roll our eyes and grumble that it’s raining, yet again.  We yearn for sunshiney days and deem rainy days as a waste. 

A couple weeks ago, during one of Charlotte’s many wet spells, I was enlightened by an article written by my favorite Charlotte Observer columnist, Tommy Tomlinson.  I feel that today is a good day to splash his wisdom a little further.

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Rain splashes into the face of our routines

Tommy Tomlinson

ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/tommytomlinson/story/1050888.html

Even a cold, rainy, miserable day creates a type of beauty.

This week, the side streets of Charlotte turned into a giant mural. The wind scraped the leaves from the trees and the rain pasted them to the asphalt. It looks like one of those Impressionist paintings – thousands of dots of color blending on the canvas. Monet in maple.

There’s always one big storm like this before the cold settles in. It changes your perspective. Before, you looked up at spotless sky and candlelit trees. Then the rain hits and you tilt your neck downward. And that’s pretty much how you stay until April comes.

Still, things are happening down there.

I had my car in the shop the other day and was talking to the mechanic about fishing. He was saying he loves to fish in the rain because the bass turn bold.

The rain blurs the surface and the fish can’t see through to the other side. They don’t see anything to be afraid of.

Maybe that works for people, too.

A long rain turns the world soft and blurry. It looks like you can wipe it with your hand and start over. People hatch plans on days like these. You might sit there and stare out the window, watching the seasons change, and decide it’s time to make some changes of your own.

Of course, on days like these, you might also decide it’s time for a nap.

But even that becomes a little piece of theater: the light leaking in through the windows, the rain like brushes on a snare drum. It’s great weather for dreams.

Or maybe nightmares. Tuesday night I was coming home late from down in York County, on a two-lane in the rain, and all of a sudden the wind kicked up.

Leaves spattered the windshield like locusts, and twigs moonwalked across the road, and there wasn’t a soul around – not even a porch light. I halfway expected Leatherface to come running out of the woods with a chain saw. It was a 10-minute ghost story, told by the storm, and when I got to the well-lit highway, part of me wanted to turn around and ride through again.

Days like these force you to slow down. Nobody strides in the rain. They tiptoe around puddles, or sidestep gutters, or clod-hop in rain boots. You have to watch where you’re going, and the best way to get there. You have to find a different path.

Sometimes, when something wrecks your routine, what you find out is that your routine ought to be wrecked. A lot of us live big chunks of our lives on autopilot – we take the same roads to and from work, jog the same route every morning, cook the same meals every week, plop down for the ball game at 1 o’clock on Sunday.

It’s natural to have a pattern to your life, and comforting. But it can get to where you live most of your life with the back of your mind. And so you don’t notice things.

That’s the value of days like these. They make you pay attention.

They take the most ordinary ingredients – water, wind, the leaves on the trees – and turn them into a potion that cures the universal illness called getting into a rut.

Yes, it’s good napping weather.

But it can also be what we need to wake us up.

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