It rained all Saturday. Not unusual for the third month of spring, but rain that goes on for days is a Melbourne fixture; a festival of sopping misery and cancelled sporting fixtures in a Mediterranean climate that is supposed to follow its seasonal script. I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s not Innisfail. But it’s not tropical either.
In childhood I hated enforced confinement. I was an outdoors child. Not the hunting and fishing type, I just did not want to be in the house for days on end. You can’t go outside. It’s raining. I can see that. It’s been raining since Wednesday. Don’t be sarcastic. That’s not sarcasm, I replied, it’s observation. I went from room to room looking for another climate. I found several in books. Then back to damp reality, in the days before I learned a harsh forbidding beauty could be found in the ever-changing skies thanks to the winds from the oceans at the bottom of the world. Through the louvred panes of a window overlooking the back garden I stared at the refracted light made by millions of drops of water on the fruit trees. Out in the street gutters flowed like little ochre rivers, leaving flattened and combed lawn edges as they retracted. I willed the sun to break through the sky’s steel trap. On drenched Sunday mornings, soaked with sanctimonious but unspecified intentions, the grey cave of a church’s interior exuded a kind of yellow darkness, illumined by a few ineffective bakelite-cylindered incandescents hanging in the gloom. Sometimes threshing rain shook the slates on the roof, metaphorically drowning the choir; but even through that bluff of medieval noise came the silvery chatter of the thurible chain as it swung its absolving incense in the dimness. This was only a couple of decades after the war, and the Latin and the smoke and the ancient music and the absurd robes and the whole cave of strict horrors seemed to be an attempt to put as much retrospective time as possible between its antiquated rituals and the gruesome, ghastly stain of the twentieth century’s barbarity. … deleantur nostra delictur. Let’s forget it ever happened.
Afterwards men wearing gabardine coats sold candles and Catholic weekly newspapers and pictures of murdered saints from the elevated window of a booth facing the doors of the church.
If the rain kept up, Sunday afternoon was irredeemable.
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More late spring weather: two weather-related posts from nineteen years ago this week.
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