Precipilicity and Desolaration

People who grow up in the Pacific Northwest suffer from peculiar disorders that I’m formally proposing for the next version of the diagnostic psychiatric manual:  we don’t feel 100% normal unless it is raining.  Summer can be a very difficult time for us.

In fact, we born and bred web-footers can feel downright depressed when it is sunny all the time.  July and August yields six to eight weeks of dusty paths, dried up creeks and wilting greenery.  We groan inwardly when yet another day dawns bright with blue skies, start to look longingly at accumulating clouds,  and get positively giddy when morning starts with a drizzly mist.

It’s difficult to say what exactly is at work in brain chemistry in cases like this.  It is the opposite effect of classically described Seasonal Affective Disorder diagnosed especially in those transplants from more southerly climates who get sadder and slowed down with darker days and longer nights.   In people like me, born a stone’s throw from Puget Sound, the more sunlight there is==the more doldrums I feel:  desolaration (desolation from too much solar exposure).   The grayer the day, the wetter the sky==a lightening of the heart and the spirit:  precipilicity (felicity arising from precipitation).

Like most northwesterners, I have low Vitamin D levels even in the summer.  It just isn’t seemly to expose all that skin to UV light.

So I’m feeling profound relief today, thank you.  There was the incredible and undeniable sound of raindrops outside the window when I woke up this morning.  There was no internal conflict about feeling compelled to go outside to work up a sweat and soak up the elusive sun rays.   There was the cozy invitation to stay inside to read and write and sleep.  I only needed a short nap to be able to cope with the day, and when I did venture out in the middle of some really good showers, the garden and I seem much fresher from our drippy dousing.

I know I’m not alone in this disorder.  Many of us are closet sufferers but would never admit it in polite company.  To complain about sunny days would be meteorologically incorrect.  It is time to acknowledge that many of us are in this together.

Robert Frost (definitely not a northwesterner) confessed his own case of desolaration in the first stanza of his poem November Guest:

“My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.”

And Jack Handey, the satirist, summarizes the reason for the guilty pleasure of the northwest native in liking rain:

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’
And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.”