We got here in February, and have been waiting with mixed feelings for the vaunted “Rainy Season.”   Perhaps, like me,  you’ve seen the old movie _Rain_, remade with Rita Hayworth as _Miss Sadie Thompson_, and you can imagine going stark raving mad as the rain continues, day after day, week after week, with no let up. 

It doesn’t do that here. 

The rainy season officially begins (along with the hurricane season) on June 1, and the weather did change noticeably in June.  May had been hot.  As a matter of fact, before that, April was hot!   In the noonday sun, it was well over a hundred, altho officially, in the shade, it might be 92.  And you either went walking early in the morning, or planned your route to include a lot of tree-lined streets. 

We planted a lot of zoysia grass, and flowers and shrubs and started watering it, and the water bill surged alarmingly.  We went from a 100 gallons a day to 500!   (We used to have a well in Colorado, and were we spoiled!)

And then it began to rain.  Sometimes it rains for twenty minutes a day.  Sometimes, it rains all day or all night.  It rarely is cloudy for twenty-four hours, and generally it clears up and is very pretty.  Mostly, it’s just a lot cooler, because the rain, and the clouds are cooling everything down into the 80’s. 

The rain here is really noisy.  Maybe that’s because we live in a house with a tin roof!  Anyway, we don’t have glass windows, we have horizontal louvers which we normally leave open at night to let the breeze come through the bedroom.  The wind comes up, and then it starts raining, and the wind is blowing it into the house.  I jump out of bed and run around and close all the louvers.  Then, since I’m awake, I watch a little TV.  (Charlotte can usually sleep through all but the loudest wettest storms.) 

In the morning, the puddles are gone, and the plants look really happy.  The grass is surely happy, because we’re having to mow it once a week instead of twice a month.  The worst of it is that the bugs, normally happy in the grass, are moving indoors to keep dry.  We are developing new and more ingenious ways to repel them.  The never-ending race between technology and nature, eh?

Lately, it has gone three days without really raining, and now I’m actually hoping for rain. It gets really humid, and feels like it’s going to rain, but then it doesn’t. We take another cool shower to simulate rain.  Every night, since the season began, however, it has been nice and cool (70’s) at night so we can sleep good.  We hope you sleep good too!

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1

Sr. ric & Mees Charlotte

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