Rain, Rain, Make My Day
Did I get off on the wrong plane and land in Dublin?
No, no, it can’t be. In Dublin the sun actually shines in the summer.
The sun. That’s right. That large, honey-lemon orb that’s gone AWOL since Memorial Day.
The sun has made fewer appearances this summer than Whitey Bulger in the North End.
As of Monday, rainfall totaled 8.35 inches this month in New York’s Central Park, more than triple the normal 2.17 inches for the period. In Hartford, there has been 3.61 inches of rain this month, compared to a normal of 2.26. If you look really, really hard at the weather icons in the upcoming days, you do see some sunshine ahead. (Oh, wait, those are lightening bolts.)
Television meteorologists are trying really hard to explain why we are getting saturated this summer, showing you their super cool Doppler and their high-tech Accu-this and Accu-that, but it all boils down to the same thing: “Rain happens.”
I don’t even bother to check the forecast any more. It’s like waiting for the results on a test you know you bombed.
Every now and then the sun shows up on a video, like Osama bin Laden. (Here’s a conspiracy theory: Is it just a coincidence that both Osama and the sun have bin> missin’?)
I was really going to try to be good this summer and avoid the sun. Can you believe it? I was afraid of ultraviolet rays. I didn’t think rust would be the real risk.
And not only rust but despair. Yes, good, old-fashioned, bleak, dismal, gloomy, alarm-clock-what-alarm-clock despair<$>.
No one is happy. OK, maybe immigrants from The Scottish Highlands are happy, but unless your idea of tropical involves mud and mushrooms, you’re pretty miserable. The only way to get rid of misery is to share it. So you hear a lot of conversations that go like this:
“This weather<$>.”
“Don’t even say it.”
“Have you ever<$>?”
“It’s just so ‑
“No kidding.”
“You said it.”
“What can you do?”
In fact, we in New England have a right to be extra miserable because we know that this parenthesis between mud and frost is truncated enough as it is.
Now that we can scratch June off the beachcomber radar, we’re looking at two months before we have to haul the turtlenecks out again.
In fact, some of us are sorry we put ours away.
In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as Helios, a hot-looking dude who drove a chariot drawn by horses from the East to the West, bringing light to the Earth.
Clearly, Helios took a wrong turn and because he’s a man, he refuses to ask for directions.
What we need to do is get Helios a good GPS system and get those horses charging again.
Or we could just crawl under the covers and wait for July.
Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.