📕 Insider #10 - It Just Keeps Raining.
A passage from "SneakyArt of Vancouver"
👋 Hello, insiders.
Next week, I travel to India after a gap of nearly 3 years. I will be spending time in New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata (my hometown). So the next few issues of the newsletter will be written ‘on the road’ and the SneakyArt I share will also come from these places. I’m excited to travel, to discover more of this world, and to show you my hometown.
Today, I’m sharing a passage from my current book-in-progress, SneakyArt of Vancouver.
One day in early October, it started to rain.
It is mid-November, and the rain has not stopped. The wife and I moved to Vancouver in late January 2021, so we are still completing our first cycle around the sun from this part of the world. Every month brings a new experience and every season is unexpected in little ways.
It rained through most of January and February, and then it stopped. Spring gave way quickly to summer. And for many months there was no rain at all. Summer brought a ‘heat-dome’ over our heads, wildfires in the mountains, and a long dry-spell. Weeks went by without a cloud in the sky. It is the longest dry spell since 1952, said the people on the news who keep track of such things. There’s never been anything like this, said the people, when I told them I was new in town.
In August, the heat started to let up. Majestic clouds returned to the skies. When it rained it felt like rain back home in India, the one you’re delighted to see because it gives you respite from the heat and freshens up the world. But autumn came too quickly and hit too hard. The leaves changed colour very quickly. In September already some trees were bare. We have never been in this part of the world so have been accepting everything we see as ‘the way things are’. Who’s to say? The sun receded sharply from its dominant position in the sky. It’s a game of latitudes after all. The sunrise happened much later, and we found ourselves waking up to darkness. The sunsets started to happen much earlier, and we found our energies sapping in the late afternoon. You need the sun in so many ways than just warmth.
Half into October and it’s a real treat if you get to see the sun at all. When we wake up in the morning, we see rain-drops streaking the windows of our apartment. Outside, the roads glisten with water, and the shiny reflections of traveling headlights. Rainwater pools on the tops of smaller buildings. The rain is near-constant but, against the grey sky, sometimes you can’t tell if it’s raining at all. When we need to step out, we look at the tops of those buildings again. Can you see drops falling on the pools of rainwater? That’s how you know it’s definitely raining.
This means that I don’t get opportunities to sketch outdoors anymore. Visiting a cafe is the only option. I appreciate cafes even more than before. I don’t always want/need a coffee, but I consider it the price of admission to a warm and dry space with a chair, a table, and a view.
It took me a while to accept that I couldn’t wait around for a sunny day.
Is there a word for this feeling? It is a kind of seasonal lag - when the season has changed but the mind has not accepted the new reality.
I clung to the hope that sunny days would come back, that surely there were some more left. I shut myself indoors, and waited for the ‘bad week’ to pass. It didn’t. It stretched into a ‘bad month’. I was forced to accept the new reality of this new world - this version of Vancouver that locals call Raincouver.