Summer Rains

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in July 2004

In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found, I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) This one is also very close to my heart because it perfectly captures my boundless joy for rain :)


In Davao, the end of summer is marked by heavy rains, the darkly gray kind that leaves everything smelling of wet, green earth afterwards. This was the rain of my childhood. Sunburned days at the beach ended with dances in the rain then—gleeful splashing around the garden, standing under the shower of a roof gutter, peering through the gate to see the neighborhood children playing games in the flooded streets.

I especially loved it when the house got flooded, too. Something about living in a watery house appealed to me. I imagined the whole living room was a lake, or an ocean, or—later on, as we took it up in Social Studies class—the canals of Venice, because we had to climb over the furniture to get to the kitchen.

When I went off to college in Manila, my father warned me, half-jokingly, about my penchant for running around in the rain. He shouldn’t have worried. Rainy days there were an unappealing brown haze, and stank of concrete parking lots and sewage water. It was the same when I moved to Cebu. When you live in a boarding house in the middle of the city, running in the rain also means running in a mixture of garbage and toxic lead tailings from vehicle exhaust.

Highly urbanized cities have a habit of squeezing people in, choking the creative spirit out of them. That’s what happened to me after awhile. It was how I was supposed to do the proper thing, say the nice, polite lines at the right time, be a certain kind of happy person, and pretend that the superficial, everyday things actually mattered in the course of living. I started to forget who I was and what I loved. It even came to a point that I would look up at the gray sky and, without really thinking, curse the deluge pouring out of it just as everyone else did. Citification had taken its toll on my sanity.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. One day last year, in a spirit of rebellious courage—and perhaps as a less freaky alternative to screaming in rage against something I couldn’t even name—I donned a swimsuit, shorts, and a shirt, and took a walk amidst the traffic and the howling of a typhoon.

Cebu is pretty much the same when it rains, only filthier and stinkier. But in that filthy, stinky world, I found freedom at last—freedom from hands preoccupied with umbrellas, freedom from the constraints of jackets and raincoats, freedom from the knee-jerk reaction to stay dry, stay clean, stay put! I laughed at people crowding under every last inch of roof and awning, trying vainly to keep their socks from getting soggy, or the mud from getting between their toes.

The chill of the wind and the cold rain pelting my skin were all I needed to jog my memory. One splash in a puddle, and I KNEW what mattered again: leaves, earth, water, air…. All the things that keep my body and spirit breathing. All the things that keep the city alive for humans and non-humans alike.

When thunder rumbles these days, I look out the office window thinking of parched islands joyfully gathering rain, of the grass and the trees drinking it all in, longing to grow greener. I stretch out my arms to catch a few raindrops, and I smile to myself: it’s almost as if I’m out there, too, dancing free and wild under the trembling skies.