There Will Come Soft Rains...*

I think the rainy season has arrived.

Locals and expats alike have been telling us that June is a month of rains.  Not exactly the monsoons.  Not torrential downpours.   More like constant drizzle broken only by periods of heavy rain.  They call these the "plum rains" because they come at the time that the plum fruits ripen.

You'd think that people would look forward to the end of the plum rains.  They don't.  After the rainy season comes the two hottest months of summer.  Many of Theresa's expat friends are fleeing the country in July and August to escape the heat.   It's kind of unsettling to see them off... like waving goodbye to lifeboat passengers as they are lowered from the decks of the Titanic.

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* Regarding the title for this post....
It rained all day on Friday.  ALL day.  The rain drumming softly on the windows recalled this phrase "there will come soft rains".   It was the title of a short story in our high-school literature book.  Freshman or Sophomore year I think, though not sure.

So I stole it for the title of this post.  Pretentious, I know.   But it's my blog.

I had to do some internet searching to fill in the large gaps in memory.  Thankfully, Wikipedia is there to help offset the toll taken by the years.  I learned that the title of the short story, by Ray Bradbury, actually comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale.:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white

These first four lines seem rather apt for the plum rains.  The remaining 8 lines of the poem get decidedly more depressing.  You can go HERE and enjoy it for yourself.

Again, it was the Ray Bradbury short story that we studied in literature class, not the poem.  The short story was written in 1950 and later became part of Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles.   It's only 4 or 5 pages long.  I'm sure the textbook authors were attracted by it's brevity.  Also, this was back in 1975, the age of Aquarius and all that.   I suspect they thought it cutting edge for them to include a study in "Modern" science fiction in a high-school textbook. 

You can read Bradbury's story There Will Come Soft Rains by clicking on this link.   It's 35 years older than it was when I first read it.  Bradbury never saw the coming of digital electronics.  But if you forgive him that, his 1950 predictions of future technology are not too ridiculous.   I hope that I hold up as well when I am 61 years old.