The first storm of the season has arrived and it’s supposed to be a big one. We have an inch accumulated in a bucket outside, so it already feels like a good soaking. 

Yesterday, the morning commute was a mess. The first rain makes the roads extra slippery, adding water to the accumulated dirt and oil that hasn’t yet been washed off, and after the dry summer, everyone has forgotten how to drive in rain. Not wanting to be on the roads, more people opt for public transportation when it rains, but it didn’t help much this time– by mid-morning BART had long delays system-wide. The city canceled tomorrow’s street fair because of the forecast of heavy rain and wind all day.

I want it to rain, I wish I could will it to rain–for the moisture, of course, but also for the way it slows everything down and makes it ok to duck under cover and take a breath. I love the way weather has the ability to change my plans and put things into perspective. A storm makes a regular busy  weekend into  an opportunity to catch up on my reading and knitting. I made beef stew and beer bread (you have to try the beer bread mix at Trader Joe’s!) and am ready for some good old-fashioned hunkering down.

Bay Area storms often dump less water than they promise, and the clouds and bluster give way to sunshine and business-as-usual again too quickly for my liking. A couple of years ago, the weather experts told us a big one was coming. School was canceled and the whole Bay Area braced for what was dubbed “Hella Storm.” It did show up, but it wasn’t the big event we were all prepared for. It was just a good storm. It felt like a let-down.

We’ve started believing that we can know and plan for everything weather-related. It’s very convenient; I can check what’s coming in the next ten days without looking out the window. It’s certainly helpful to  give people in the path of a storm time to prepare or evacuate, but I wonder if another motivation is to make modern life weather-proof, to get to the point that weather can’t interrupt our busyness or disrupt our lives. If we know what’s going to happen, we can side-step it and plan around it.  It’s the illusion of control.

Maybe it was better when we didn’t have the technology to track weather systems so accurately. The old-fashioned ways of predicting weather kept it a mystery. Seeing rings around the moon, feeling an ache in my bad knee, looking for a green tint to the sky or watching to see how many nuts the squirrels are storing seems more like a weather premonition than a promise, but I’m ok with uncertainty in weather. It’s changeable by nature.  Even with modern equipment and knowledge of how weather works, storms still seem to  have a mind of their own. We can see what weather is doing but not exactly what it’s going to do.

Technology makes us feel like we know what’s coming, but looking at the clouds and smelling rain in the wind isn’t a bad way to gauge things either. Whether we know what’s coming ten days out or just feel the drops and grab a jacket, we can’t control it.

The weather ap on my phone says it’s supposed to start raining early tomorrow morning and keep up all day. I guess I won’t make any plans, though–I’ll wait to hear the pitter-patter of raindrops on my roof.