Rainy June.

From Mansfield

I love thunder that shakes the house and makes the cat nervously seek me out for safety's sake.

Outwardly I agree with the gripers in order to seem the pleasant conversationalist. "Damn rain! Just when you think it can't get any wetter! Everything's waterlogged! Is it ever gonna be summer?" Inwardly though, I'm feeling as if I'd like to give them a tour of how amazing the cloud formations have been this spring and early summer. I want to describe to them what I've learned, just by observation of my own garden, about the weird and wonderful lives of snails and slugs - where they lay their eggs, what flowers they like to eat, which ones they stay away from, how you can wage war on them and still find them fascinating. I want to talk to the weather-complainers about how the strawberries have changed over the past weeks due to an excessive amount of water. I want to share with them the humor in watching from the window as my middle-aged neighbors literally run for cover, high-tailin' it like I've never seen them do - the man in a just-home-from-work pair of charcoal gray dress pants and cobalt blue button down - "as the clouds rip open and the rain pours through a gaping wound" (to spontaneously steal from the U2 lyric). Their black lab, who they were dutifully out walking around the yard, merely saunters back to the house with a slow tail-wag, as raindrops the size of nickles pelt straight down from the sky.

A lot of people are pissed about how rainy it has been this June. Of course, a lot of people are pissed about the weather no matter what it is. I find that both so human and so humorous.

I'd like to hope that maybe it's just a cover - bitching about the weather. Small talk. A way to empty the weight of silence between strangers. Maybe other people are, like me, secretly hoping for and reveling in the next big crack of thunder. They are doubting that they'll see hail of any size as threatened in the severe weather warning on weather.com but hoping that they will, It would be comforting to imagine that all the weather nay-sayers might be observing nature's response to so much water and so little sun and learning a little in the process, just like me.

It's so un-cool to be amenable to whatever the weather offers. Being publicly content with bad weather is an instant conversation killer.