As my mother’s liver failed her and she floated away from us (was it on the river of our tears?), the long drought broke in California. While mama died in the living room, outside the rain sluiced down soaking ground that only a few months before had cracked into geometric flakes as it shrank away from itself. So much rain fell that the ground swelled back into itself as particles of soil—clay, silt, loam, and spongy organic matter—soaked up moisture and became a semi-solid mud. Christmas was wet; we couldn’t go outside, even if we had wanted to.

Or did we go out? I can’t remember. It seems like perhaps we did. Did we walk out in the Baylands?  It seems unlikely that we would have left her. But it had been a family habit for a long time, to walk by the Bay on holidays, even in rough weather. Did we go on Christmas day? My mind is a blank; I’m losing the last days my mother was alive. My brain is darkening the jangling nightmare of the hospital, blurring the memory of slow, frightening days at home as we waited for her to go. I’m not altogether ready for that amnesia.

Since my mother left, rain has fallen every week, sometimes every day. The big creeks and rivers in the flats are above flood stage; rills of silver water lace through the pastures in the foothills, and as I drive through the mountains, I surge through sheets of water that flow across the highway. Waterfalls cut the canyon walls and bring rock and dirt tumbling across both lanes.

I approve of this rainy weather. California needs the water; during the last few summers we’ve gone from being the Golden State to being the Slightly-Gray State, the tawny grasses that grow across the state charcoaled by heat and dryness. We need the rain. And I admit, it suits my mood. Grievous weather.

The rain does keep me inside, which I don’t like. I sit at the dining table and look out through the branches of the bull pine, admiring the water that drips down the grooves in the needles and forms chains of wet round drops along the slender green lines. Clouds often blow across the mountain, and the view through the tree shifts and fades into white so that I can’t see the grove of tall ponderosas at the base of the little valley we overlook. Then the wind picks up and the clouds evaporate and I watch the trees tilt from the wind. They are so tall that I worry about them falling, but the long line of them so far has held.

As have I, surprisingly. When my mother first passed, it seemed like a black wind ripped me off my pins, weakened my fastenings to the earth. Not being as strong as a ponderosa, I feel to the ground quite often, a rubbly pile of sobs. But I got back up. I had to.

Rain is falling tonight as I write this, a heavy warm rain that’s melting the snow in the high country and tickling the tree frogs in the valley so that they sing songs of lust and love every night. The rain softens the sharp edges of my hurt.

Saturday we are supposed to have sun. I’m a little worried about what that might do to my equilibrium; I’ve got a shakey balance going on between how much I grieve and how much rain is falling. I’m afraid sunny skies might tip the balance. Fortunately, there is more rain in the forecast.

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