On softness

It is a grey day. Rainy. It’s been raining a lot lately. A desert climate hangover I never quite shake is my love of rain, mist, clouds. It’s the softness, the world plumped through with cushions. Back home, mist is rare and precious. A rainy day is uncommon. When it does come, it comes in a downpour: forceful, with thunderclouds and claps. All this is a fact of living in a severe climate, bone dry crisp cold in winter, bone dry crisp hot in summer, and no cushion seasons of spring or fall to speak of. I used to like hot summer days a lot, but a stint in central Mexico--four months without a cloud and so parched the laundry would dry in twenty minutes--cured me of that passion. Now, I don’t even think about the climate back home, or any other climate, except to shiver and be glad I’m not there. Now, I whole-heartedly welcome the gentle mist, the light rain, the dignified cloud.

A few exceptions to this mentality glimmer through, though, like winking nuggets in a gold miner’s pan. This winter, I had a sudden memory of sharp frosted mornings, where a twinkling line of white traces every tree limb. As a child, I imagined Jack Frost sprinting along each branch with his wand, leaving a perfect sparkling outline. Snow mixed with fairy dust. Winter here is mounds of snow, puffy as cotton wool, a heavy load on houses and trees, more the work of a mythical fat farmer’s wife, generous and jolly, tossing bucketloads from the sky like feed for chickens.

Today was another such instance, an exceptional yearning for the harsh dryness. I’m reading a book set in Libya. The story, and to a certain extent the characters, are nothing startling. But the author is so loving an understanding towards all his complex characters, and he describes in aching detail Mediterranean life: the baked white houses, mulberry and lemon trees, the sea breeze intoxicating the scorched air.

I bought a photograph in New York. It’s a series of photographs, actually, of horizon and ocean. I love the simple lines, the fact that although each of the 8 shots depicts the same span of (Mediterranean) ocean and sky, the colours vary from sage green to teal to royal blue to lavender. On a break from my book, just when the mother stands on the roof of their white flat-topped home in her silk billowing robe looking out to sea, I stared at the photos. And I yearned for the Mediterranean.

It’s funny how some landscapes stick with you. There’s a hilly, scrubby stretch of land between Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta that makes me cry it seems so to call to me. And the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited is Corsica, a teardrop in the Mediterranean closer to Italy than its motherland France. The rough cliffs and crashing blue sea, the splashes of bold bougainvillea, the rugged baked-dry mountains and coarse sand beaches. It seemed to me to take the best of the harsh climate, but not the worst. Seemed a version of that climate in which people could be reasonably expected to live for 12 consecutive months (which no-one ever did in Saskatchewan until the white folk showed up).

I think of you in that hot, sticky land. I remember the mugginess of Hong Kong, the searing heavy heat of Colombo, and think of you in that, and wonder if it has worked its way under your BC skin.