Sixty-something, partly cloudy, with a light breeze. While this phrase could arguably be used to describe me, this time it is, in fact, a description of recent weather here in Craig, on the outskirts of the Southeast Alaskan rainforest. I am fond of saying that there are two kinds of weather in Craig: straight-down rain and sideways rain. Obviously, this is not always true, since the weather so far this summer of 2021 has been mostly “beautiful.”

What makes weather “beautiful,” and who gets to decide this designation? Here we tend to use it as a generic catch-all for any day that isn’t raining puppy-dogs and toad-frogs. But is that a fair designation? Why are we so grouchy about rain? How do I love the rain? Let me count the ways. . .My mother, ultimate contrarian that she was in many ways, loved the rain too. I recall a letter she wrote me in which she said, “today is a beautiful, gray, rainy day.”

I recall one October (sideways rain) years ago when I was feeling as monochromatic as the weather, wondering how in the world I had wound up in the one area of Alaska where one has to constantly explain the weather and climate to outsiders. I chided myself gently, reminded myself of my mother’s description of a “beautiful” day, and looked out the window at the storm. A phrase popped into my head: fantastical rainstorm. Somehow, the phrase took away any vestige of the humdrum and made music out of the rain drops rattling against my windows.

I was already living in Craig when a drought came to Virginia. Trees died in the forest, and my parents had to dig a new, much deeper well. One casualty was a white pine that Uncle Brooks had given me, that we had planted in the back yard. I grieved its loss more keenly because my mother had been in the habit of sending me yearly pictures of its growth. Meanwhile, the rain in Southeast Alaska was sliding sideways off the earth, out to the ocean, and back to the sky. I thought of a former governor of Alaska, who had wanted to tow some icebergs down to California to help with drought conditions there.

So let it rain, baby. On “beautiful” days I will paint siding, or sit in my back yard and watch the hummingbirds, and on sideways days I’ll organize the pantry. You can’t have one without the other.