Whew, it’s wet and humid here! I’ve just finished putting a casserole on to cook in my slow cooker. I have a bunch of friends coming round for dinner tonight. Next task is peeling a bag of spuds. I usually stick to easier meals like home made pizza but I wanted to do something a bit special tonight, it’s the first time my little goddaughter Sophie will be visiting my place!

The weather is crazy wonderful here. It’s been pouring with rain for a couple of days and lots of South Australia is beyond damp and into deluged. I’m happy as a duck. I like rain. I like being able to turn the fan on at night, huddle under my blanket, and stick out one foot for temperature regulation. If just my toes are poking out I’m cool. If half my calf is exposed I’m a little warm.

Weather is one thing that almost always makes us switch. I love it. There’s a fatigue that sets in when it’s been the same for too long. Life starts to feel flat, to stretch before me like a road going nowhere. Then a shift in the weather will spin my carousel round again and someone else comes out and breathes in deeply and we feel alive again. I love the weather. I love not being able to control it. I love that it intrudes into our lives in ways we try to prevent. It insists we pay attention to it, insists that we feel something. I love storms and rain and wind and lightening. I love going down the beach in crazy weather and screaming into the wind. I love staying up late with a hot chocolate and watching the lightening. I love the whisper of someone who has been forgotten about, left behind in the hustle of our life, especially our new life, so focused on accomplishment and productivity and efficiency and being adult.

Rain brings out the poets. It always has. Yesterday I was melancholy in that bitter sweet way that makes you want to savour it. Last night I sank into bed after cleaning the kitchen, and fell into a dream where my front yard flooded, and I started to pull trash from it only to find that there was no soil beneath the plants. A cave full of water and tree roots and water pipes lay under everything. Cold, and strange, clear water running. In one dream I fell into it and the sodden earth and lawn collapsed onto me. Their weight was intense, constricting my lungs, the feel of mud squeezing around me, making a perfect mold of my limbs. In another I sat by it, lifting this curtain of green things with my shovel to gaze at a world under my own world, unsuspected and singing to me.

I want to sleep outdoors again. I miss my caravan. Miss being deafened by the rain. I’d love to have a tent or yurt out in the yard and on good nights, nights when I’m not too sick or too scorched, to go and sleep there, listening to the night wind and the trains running in the distance, and the possums looking for dinner. There’s so much life here, if we don’t wall ourselves off from it.