The rain I got caught in today wasn’t the pleasant spring rain of romance and poetry, but the nasty kind where the raindrops are like pellets of ice that don’t come down from the sky but straight out of nowhere, right at your face. It’s like being attacked with a thousand tiny knives. And I’m convinced the only time it rained like that was when I was walking from my car to the post office. I do know that when I left the post office (about, oh, two minutes later), it had stopped raining altogether. But I was still wet, and cold.

Later in the afternoon I was sitting at the computer and I heard what sounded like a plane landing in my garden. This time it was the kind of rain that explodes from the clouds all at once, as if a giant bucket had been tipped over. This one didn’t last very long, either, but it soaked the yard and filled the puddles in the driveway.

No, I don’t like the rain much. I don’t think it’s selfish to say I don’t like it. If I had the power to stop it from raining — and used that power — now, that would be selfish. But I don’t have it, and I probably wouldn’t use it if I did. (You know who does like the rain? Every bird in the county, because they all seemed to be in my yard at the same time after the cloudburst this afternoon.)