Summer Rains: A Nicaraguan Oxymoron

 It rains here nearly every day.  Not the useless drizzle common to this time of year, but heavy, drowning, downpours normally reserved for the wet season.  The sun is so terrified some days that he refuses to show his face.  On occasion he’ll sheepishly peer out from behind the clouds and send a rainbow in his stead, but that’s just about all the courage he can muster.

The summer months of December through May are supposed to allow us to raise a fist to the sky, shake it vigorously, and curse the sun and his repulsive, unwavering spirit.  He leaves us sightless from his unnecessarily intense shine and delirious from dehydration.  He’s like a narcissistic king, demanding that everyone recognize his divine authority and supreme greatness but always with eyes averted.  Then he makes up for his behavior by dimming his blinding light as he settles behind the horizon.  He picks the most brilliant reds, oranges, and purples he’s got.  He fires them high into the sky and in such great quantities that they have no choice but to take over everything.  The sun lets them slowly drift down towards the horizon long after he himself has already moved on.  In the later months of summer, when we can’t take it much longer, he picks the spot exactly between the two volcanoes rising out of Lake Nicaragua, Volcán Maderas and Volcán Concepción, and performs his same trick there.  He makes it appear as if both volcanoes are in full eruption.  “How could you stay mad at me?” he seems to ask.  And for a few short hours we forget what a pain in the ass he’s been.

 Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway.  But as I said, the rains never left.  Thunder and lightning respected the natural order of things.  One grand finale with zero encores and they were gone.  But the rain, that stubborn bastard, refused.  The rain isn’t capable of the same shocking explosions that thunder and lightning are known for so it turns the zinc roofs into deafening instruments.  It bangs on them wildly but with fantastic rhythm.  It’s hard to imagine that such a common occurrence can seem so out of place when stuck in the middle of March, but it is.  In fact it seems so out of place that every time it happens it’s worthy of intense discussion with whoever’s nearest.  It’s a summer like none before.  Sprinting from clothesline to clothesline to shelter the drying laundry from an approaching storm isn’t supposed to be a year-round chore.  The students should have one less excuse to skip class therefore leaving them with only 15 or 20 good ones.  And I shouldn’t be able to say, “God damn it I forgot my umbrella again,” with such a great Nicaraguan accent and accompanying dramatic body language.  But it’s not all grim.  The passing buses don’t leave clouds of suffocating dust in their wake as they travel along the gravel highway.  What would otherwise be an agonizingly hot day bearing down on us is kept at bay behind a thick layer of clouds.  And the rooster’s 4am performance is all but inaudible when competing with the white noise of rain pounding on metal.

It’s undeniable that things are different this year and you can see it in the expressions on the faces of those who have called this town their home for their entire lives.  There’s often comfort in familiarity and it can be a frightening thing to lose, especially when so many things are already out of our control.  But regardless of one’s personal opinion regarding climate change and human impact on an already unpredictable and powerful phenomenon, all this certainly begs the question: why haven’t the rains left as they have, without fail, every year before?