Rain, drizzle and fog

“Can you hear me?

That when it rains and shines (When it rains and shines) It’s just a state of mind…” —“Rain,” The Beatles

I saw the sun today, oh boy.

No, seriously. I'm not riffing on a Beatles song.

It had been gone so long I forgot what it was.

How annoying it was. How incessantly bright. How unpleasantly warm on the back of your neck, the top of your head as you sit at your desk with your back to the window, wishing for rain.

If it's glaring off the screen as you read this now, or shining in your eyes as you try to read the newspaper, you could be forgiven for cursing a bit.

The forecast says the sun will shine all weekend.

Two days too many, if you ask me.

We make so much of the sun here, like a long-lost relative that's finally shown up for dinner.

Show it the door, I say. It's not worth all the fuss that's made of it. All of those inane songs: “Here Comes the Sun,” “Walking on Sunshine,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows.”

Spare me.

There are actually people who travel in search of sunny climes. Sunseekers, I believe they're called.

Fools.

Think of all the accoutrements the sun and its accompanying heat require when we reach double-digit temperatures: sunblock, umbrellas, awnings, fans, sunglasses, floppy hats (shudder), hydrating drinks, ice cubes, swimming pools, screened-in strollers for the little ones. So much bother.

Give me a soothing grey day of rain, drizzle and fog. Nice brisk winds at about 70 kilometres an hour, lashing your hair into your eyes. A heavy sideways mist that slaps your face like a cold washcloth.

Bracing stuff. No one lolls about in that, “fog-bathing.”

Before this week we had 20 glorious days or so of RDF in a row, closing in on a record. How wonderful it was. Thick muffling fog that made you feel encased in cotton wool, shutting out all sound except your own breathing and your footsteps on the pavement. Fog so thick the houses were more vague impressions than anything else — shrubs, trees, hydrants, hedges, rooftops all gently blurred into amorphous grey shapes in the fine driving rain. Intermittent raven squawks and the bark of a far-off-sounding dog the only noises that penetrated the unyielding silence.

Or better yet, there's this: bitter, lashing rain. Rain teetering on the point of freezing but still not quite ready to make that commitment.

Rain that drenches you to the skin as you make the frenzied dash from your car in the parking lot to the supermarket — struggling, white-knuckled, to put your mask straps around your wet ears with clumsy fingers as fat drops drip from the roof onto your exposed head and down your jacket collar and onto your vulnerable neck.

And, then, wonder of wonders, on the return trip, it has turned to freezing sleet. It slashes at your face like small knives, threatens to up-end you on the icy pavement, precipitates a desperate search in your vehicle's trunk for the scraper you thought you wouldn't need again this year (poor, misguided wretch).

You hack at the ice-encrusted windshield as your mask slowly starts to freeze to your face. The vicious, howling wind rattles the shopping carts huddled in their corrals as if threatening them with violence, then rips the car door out of your shaking hands.

Overhead, the ice is busy sheathing wires and tree branches, the wind shaking both in a brittle, rattling dance. Twigs are snapping from the strain, blowing around in mad eddies hovering just above the ground, where wet grocery receipts snatched by the wind lie plastered on the pavement.

Now that's a spring day in Newfoundland.

Yes, please. Let's have some more of that.