The Last Pluviophiles

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She hated it. She hated how capricious it was, how it came all too sudden without even a hint of how long it was planning to stay. She hated how it ruined her plans every time. She hated how it made her clothes take longer to dry up, or how it forced her to carry a bag around just for an umbrella.
She hated the rains.


She thought me insane to be a pluviophile. I thought her insane to not be one. For, she did not see how the drops of magic accentuated a warm cup of tea. Or how the blanket and bed grew a lot comfier in its presence. Or how it brought joy when it met my skin, how it soothed my disturbed mind, and how its petrichor kept me grounded to earth. A beauty from the heavens in every sense.

Or so I had believed. For long had I yearned for it year after year. For that blissful season, I so adored. Until the last year when it broke the rules. Last year, when it had poured and poured with no end, watching my joy turn into worry and then astonishment. It had poured until the sky couldn't tell between the land and the sea. It had poured until our homes and highways went missing underneath. It had poured until the cars and trucks floated in mud, and until the boats were our primary means of commute.

I felt cheated. The pluviophile had begun to reconsider herself. For humans to have many faces was well known. It seemed that so did the forces of nature. How else would the beauty falling from the heavens have the power to both soothe and destroy the soul?

But I could not unlove it. It deserved a second chance. So I waited for the cycle again. The fall, the not-so-cold 'winter', and the scorching summer before the clouds set to work yet again. I awed as it poured, and smiled as it pattered the tin roof in my courtyard. But in a few days, the courtyard turned a pond and my smile was wiped off. It had happened again.

They've started a revolution. Them forces have joined hands. Four and a half billion years old, now our mother is coughing with a cold. The rains aren't alone. The winds are heating up, the glaciers are melting down, and the oceans are rising high. It's the onset of World War III. Us against climate change.

We might live by. But I worry for the ones who might never see the rains for what it used to be, who might not sing pitter-patter to the raindrops on the roof, who might not dance in the puddles with their pajamas dripping wet, or even sigh at the droplets racing down their car window.

The last of the pluviophiles, we possibly could be. The last rains to fall in love with before the rage begins.

For now, the mother's holding on, and we're holding on to her.
But for how much longer, not a soul can tell.

. . .