Rain

You know that you're an Oregonian when you want the rain to be perfect, and a particular type. Not just any plain old rain will do. When the heavens fall, and they tend to do that a lot around here, I just stand or sit there and classify the droplets. There's the sideways slant, which hits you in the face as you're walking from your car to school and comes along with wind that shoves you into the puddles. There's the useless drip, that just falls from the sky with no purpose or intention. There's the rain that comes when the sun is coming out, which is close to my favorite rain but different enough for me to hate it with a passion (the weather is bipolar. It has no idea what it wants to do). And, of course, there's the rainstorm, with the swaying and bending trees and the sound of it hitting your windowpane and running through the drainpipe that was so conveniently placed right next to your bedroom window.

None of these are what I like the most, though, the rain that fell this morning. I call it Irish rain, because it's what falls in my Ireland, the one that I've pictured in my head so many times that it must be real, along with France, Germany, and Scotland. I'm a very particular person when it comes to my rain, but this is almost indescribable. It comes after a good long shower, right in that fragile time where the rainbows appear and everything seems so eerily mystical. The sky is a deep, dark blue, almost purple, but the sun still shines through, usually on one side more than the other. There's no wind, nothing to blow the trees around, and the water just falls off of the branches. And the green! Everything that is any shade of green is made a thousand times more brilliant, the different hues never more apparent. Everything has a golden sort of color. Gold and green, my two favorite colors.

This Saint Patrick's Day, I knew that I wanted my rain. Seeing as it's one of my favorite holidays, you can imagine how hard I wished during the days leading up to it. On the day of, I was sitting outside with my friends on their street of our neighborhood, in the glorious sun, when all of a sudden it started to rain. After the shower had been on full blast for about five minutes, I realized that it was the Irish rain, and I started running around the street, yelling something about the Irish gods. My friends looked at me like I was insane, but they have never visited Ireland. Of course, neither have I, but that's two places they have to go. The real one and the one inside my head. And I'm afraid to say that the latter is currently closed to all visitors.