It rains here every day. Like every single day. It clears up sometimes, for a few hours, but it never really stops. Sometimes it is a light, gentle rain, with only scattered cloud cover. But mostly not. Mostly, there are very dark clouds that block out 95% of sunlight, and these pour monster amounts of water, at once, for hours at a time.
Even during those few moments when rain isn't actually falling (during these brief respites, the sun will sometimes come out), it is so humid that you can, like, feel the air. Certainly you can smell the air. Because everything smells swampy and moldy, all the time. Like when you're at the lake, but not the main part of the lake, the backwater part, where the little tar-paper shacks are, instead of the big houses with their own marinas.
That's what it smells like here, all the time. Everything not under a roof (and some stuff that is) is constantly soaking wet, inundated. Under the 10 inch grass (never dry enough to mow, though I've seen a couple of lawn-zealot peeps in my neighborhood actually mowing while it was raining), my lawn is a sodden mud puddle, and has been saturated since May. (At the curb, you can actually see the standing water, like, slightly overflowing into the gutter, like the curb itself is holding a big shallow muddy pool. One of the oddest sights I have ever seen, lawn-wise.)
At first it was funny. A while back my mom was joking with me, saying I've been thinking about how much you must hate all this rain we've been getting. That was FOUR weeks ago, and it has rained every single day since then.
It isn't funny anymore. Make it stop.
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The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.
--"The Long Rain," by Ray Bradbury
My mildew is mildewed.
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