From the short story “The Long Rain” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury:
“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.”
Part of Bradbury’s themed collection The Illustrated Man, this short story was subsequently adapted and included in the 1969 film by the same name, then later featured in the television anthology The Ray Bradbury Theater. The power of the short story, and the film adaptations, came from Bradbury’s ability to take something typically benign — rain! — and turn it into a malevolent force that pounds a group of space travelers marooned on a distant planet. Spoiler alert: the men go insane.
I’ve thought of the film often over the past couple of weeks, when Atlanta’s version of the long rain continued with barely a pause from a few days before Christmas before finally stopping just yesterday. You know that soothing feeling you get from listening to the rain when you’re just barely awake in the early morning? It turns into something else, much less pleasant, on the fourth or fifth day in a row that rain beating on the roof wakes you up at 4:00 AM! 🙂
I suppose it’s only marginally interesting to write about the weather in a blog post; but with above-average temperatures, the rain and clouds clearing away have revealed how nature’s reacting. Irises in my front garden are pushing out a few buds (stay tuned for macros!), normally dormant holly ferns have generated large new fronds, and even perennial lantana and hydrangea stems are dotted with the beginnings of new leaves. But of course it’s not spring yet and unless the temperatures remain above freezing for the next two months, most of this early growth could get crushed later in January or February.
The relentless rain, day after day, did give me a chance to pack up the holiday decorations and sweep out the Christmas glitter, jazz up the theme on my self-hosted blog, and work through the rest of the 200 archived winter photos that I started posting here. I often thought while working on the images that it would have been a hoot if, instead of two weeks or rain, we’d had two weeks of snow … so I guess I was treating myself to a vicarious experience of a snowstorm to blot out the sound of the pounding rain.
From the winter photos I processed, I’ve selected 51 to post here on my blog; below is the first of three sets that were taken in the days after a snowstorm some years ago when I traveled to northern New York around the holidays. Enjoy the photos; as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!
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